Giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) are good models of living cells, owing to their size and lamellarity. Compartmentalization within lipid vesicles has been exploited for the study of membrane behavior, lipid mechanics and a variety of biological processes, though their synthesis is not straightforward. We describe the development of a stratified flow driven microfluidic approach to GUV assembly...

MOTIVATION In order to obtain statistically relevant results, the study of membrane effects at the single-vesicle level requires the analysis of several hundreds of giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs), which becomes a very time-consuming task if carried out manually. Complete and user-friendly software for fast and bias-free automated analysis has not been reported yet. RESULTS We developed a f...

The influence of a c(2x2) ordered interface alloy of 3d transition metals at the ferromagnet/nonmagnet interface on interlayer exchange coupling (IXC), the formation of quantum well states (QWS) and the phenomenon of Giant MagnetoRe-sistance is investigated. We obtained a strong dependence of IXC on interface alloy formation. The GMR ratio is also strongly influenced. We found that Fe, Ni and C...

We present experimental results regarding the electrotransfer of plasmid DNA into phosphatidylcholine giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs). Our observations indicate that a direct entry is the predominant mechanism of electrotransfer. A quantitative analysis of the DNA concentration increments inside the GUVs is also performed, and we find that our experimental data are very well described by a si...

Movement sensitive giant neurons in the lobula plate of the fly (H,-neurons, V-neurons) are affected by low con­ centrations of volatile anesthetics (halothane, N20): the spike frequency generated by motion in the preferred di­ rection decreases, that in the opposite direction increases. This means that the response to the motion stimulus de­ fined as the spike frequency modulation decreases. H...

Giant phospholipid vesicles are shown to exhibit thermally activated transitions between a prolate and an oblate shape on a time scale of several seconds. From the fluctuating contour of such a vesicle we extract ellipticity as an effective reaction coordinate whose temporal probability distribution is bimodal. We then reconstruct the effective potential from which we derive an activation energ...

This paper is concerned with the complexity of generic algorithms solving so-called index-search problems such as the discrete logarithm problem in a cyclic group. The index-search problem was deened as follows: given a list (a i) i2I of elements of some set S, and given an element b of S, nd an i 2 I such that b = a i. The notion of a generic algorithm on the other hand was introduced by Shoup...

Solitons in field theory provide a window into regimes not directly accessible by the fundamental perturbative degrees of freedom. Motivated by interest in the worldsheet S-matrix of string theory in AdS5×S in the limit of infinite worldsheet volume we consider the semiclassical quantization of a particular soliton of this theory: the Hofman-Maldacena ‘giant magnon’ spinning string. We obtain e...

Perhaps the defining issue of our time in history is the emergence of India and the People’s Republic of China as regional military superpowers. This is a direct by-product of large scale industrialisation, as the economies of these billion plus population base nations are able to support increasingly large and modern military force structures. Spare cash and national pride are often a volatile...