Ebola virus (EBOV) is an enveloped RNA virus that causes hemorrhagic fever in humans and non-human primates. Infection requires internalization from the cell surface and trafficking to a late endocytic compartment, where viral fusion occurs, providing a conduit for the viral genome to enter the cytoplasm and initiate replication. In a concurrent study, we identified clomiphene as a potent inhib...

Amphiphilic molecules with hydrophobic tails and hydrophilic heads form micelles of various shapes and sizes above a minimum threshold concentration known as the critical micelle concentration (CMC). The CMC as well as the size and the shape of the aggregates formed depend on various factors, e.g., the length of the amphiphiles, their internal rigidity, and temperature. In this letter we report...

The effects of lateral tension on the properties of membranes are often explained in comparison with analogous experiments on monolayers, which yield more detailed data. To calculate the effects of changes in tension on the composition of, or incorporation of amphiphiles into membranes we examine (i) the fidelity of the monolayer analogy, (ii) the range of possible tensions in a membrane, and t...

The membrane lipid environment and lipid signaling pathways are potentially involved in the modulation of the activity of the cardiac Na-Ca exchanger (NCX). In the present study biophysical mechanisms of interactions of amphiphiles with the NCX and the functional consequences were examined. For this purpose, intracellular Ca concentration jumps were generated by laser-flash photolysis of caged ...

Wet foams are used in many important technologies either as end or intermediate products. However, the thermodynamic instability of wet foams leads to undesired bubble coarsening over time. Foam stability can be drastically improved by using particles instead of surfactants as foam stabilizers, since particles tend to adsorb irreversibly at the air-water interface. Recently, we presented a nove...

The hydration of the lipid 1-palmitoyl-2-oleoylphosphatidylcholine (POPC) and of the cationic detergent dodecyltrimethylammonium bromide (DTAB) has been studied by means of isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC), gravimetry, and infrared (IR) spectroscopy. During the experiments films of the amphiphiles are perfused by an inert gas of variable relative humidity. The measurement of adsorption he...

A complete homologous series of fluorescent 7-nitrobenz-2-oxa-1,3-diazol-4-yl-(NBD) labelled fatty amines of varying alkyl chain lengths, NBD-Cn, inserted in 1-palmitoyl, 2-oleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (POPC) or N-palmitoyl sphingomyelin (SpM) bilayers, with 50 mol% and 40 mol% cholesterol (Chol), respectively, was studied using atomistic molecular dynamics simulations. For all amphiphile...

The integration of discrete metal complexes has been attracting significant interest due to the potential of these materials for soft metal-metal interactions and supramolecular assembly. Additionally, block copolypeptide amphiphiles have been investigated concerning their capacity for self-assembly into structures such as nanoparticles, nanosheets and nanofibers. In this study, we combined the...