D-Penicillamine—Production and Properties

The non-naturally occurring amino acid D -penicillamine, originally only of interest as a key substance in the structural elucidation and total synthesis of penicillins is gaining increasing importance as a therapeutic, particularly in the long-term treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. D -Penicillamine which previously was obtained semi-synthetically by degradation of penicillins can now be totally synthesized using a new process which starts from isobutyraldehyde, sulfur, ammonia, and hydrogen cyanide and yields the racemate which is then selectively resolved. The biochemical behavior of D -penicillamine—chelate formation with heavy metal ions, cleavage of disulfide bridges, and condensation with aldehyde groups—affords information related to its therapeutic activity.     

Plug ‘n Play Simplicity for Wireless Medical Body Sensors

Wireless medical body sensors are a key technology for unobtrusive health monitoring. The easy setup of such wireless body area networks is crucial to protect the user from the complexity of these systems. But automatically forming a wireless network comprising all sensors attached to the same body is challenging. We present a method for making wireless body-worn medical sensors aware of the persons they belong to by combining body-coupled with wireless communication. This enables a user to create a wireless body sensor network by just sticking the sensors to her body. A personal identifier allows sensors to annotate their readings with a user ID thereby ensuring safety in personal healthcare environments with multiple users.     

On the vibrational linear and nonlinear optical properties of compounds involving noble gas atoms: HXeOXeH,HXeOXeF, and FXeOXeF

The vibrational (hyper)polarizabilities of some selected Xe derivatives are studied in the context of Bishop–Kirtman perturbation theory (BKPT) and numerical finite field methodology. It was found that for this set of rare gas compounds, the static vibrational properties are quite large, in comparison to the corresponding electronic ones, especially those of the second hyperpolarizability. This also holds for the dc‐Pockels β(?ω;ω,0), Kerr γ(?ω;ω,0,0) and electric field second harmonic generation γ (?2ω;ω,ω,0) effects, although the computed nuclear relaxation (nr) vibrational contributions are smaller in magnitude than the static ones. HXeOXeH was used to study the effects of electron correlation, basis set, and geometry. Geometry effects were found to lead to noticeable changes of the vibrational and electronic second hyperpolarizability. A limited study of the effect of Xe insertion to the nr vibrational properties is also reported. Assessment of the results revealed that Xe insertion has a remarkable effect on the nr (hyper)polarizabilities. In terms of the BKPT, this is associated with a remarkable increase of the electrical and mechanical anharmonicity terms. The latter is consistent with the anharmonic character of several vibrational modes reported for rare gas compounds. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Protein Phosphorylation and Cellular Information Transfer: Signaling by MAP Kinase Cascades

Summary. Living cells, unicellular organisms as well as cells of multicellular organisms, are permanently exposed to a multitude of signals. Cells have to transform these external stimuli into physiological intelligible signals that are transduced from outside of the cell into the cell to induce a proper cellular response. Extracellular stimuli are perceived and internalised by various cellular receptors. Subsequently, signals are transduced by one of many protein kinase signaling cascades. Mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs) belong to the evolutionary most conserved class of such molecular switches. MAPKs can change the activity of target proteins and thereby bring about physiological responses to external signals. This review discusses the basic principles of MAPK pathways in the context of cellular information processing: Cellular bioinformatics is an increasingly important interdisciplinary field with important implications for basic and applied sciences.Received February 24, 2003; accepted March 28, 2003 Published online August 18, 2003