The need for clean, renewable energy has fostered research into photovoltaic alternatives to silicon solar cells. Pigment-protein complexes in green plants convert light energy into chemical potential using redox processes that produce molecular oxygen. Here, we report the first use of spinach protein photosystem II (PSII) core complex in lipid films in photoelectrochemical devices. Photocurren...

A spin-labeling study of interactions of a fusion peptide from the hemagglutinin of the influenza virus, wt20, and a fusion-inactive mutant DeltaG1 with dimyristoylphosphatidylcholine (DMPC) and 1-palmitoyl-2-oleoyl-phosphatdylcholine bilayers was performed. We found that upon binding of wt20, the ordering of headgroups and the ordering of acyl chains near the headgroup increased significantly,...

A novel dialysis adapter has been developed for USP apparatus 4 for in vitro release testing of dispersed system dosage forms. This USP apparatus 4 method was optimized and compared with currently used dialysis and reverse dialysis sac methods. Optimization studies for the USP apparatus 4 method showed that release from solution, suspension and liposome formulations was not flow rate limited an...

Farnesol interacts with membranes in a wide variety of biological contexts, yet our understanding of how it affects lipid bilayers is not yet complete. This study investigates how the 15-carbon isoprenoid, farnesol, influences the phase behaviour, lateral organization, and mechanical stability of dimyristol phosphatidylcholine (DMPC) model membranes. Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) of m...

A distributed model predictive control (DMPC) approach based on distributed optimization is applied to the power reference tracking problem of a hydro power valley (HPV) system. The applied optimization algorithm is based on accelerated gradient methods and achieves a convergence rate of O ( 1 k ) , where k is the iteration number. Major challenges in the control of the HPV include a nonlinear ...

Addition of a weak polyelectrolyte, poly(methacrylic acid) (PMA), to a supported phospholipid bilayer made from 1,2-dimyristoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (DMPC) depresses the melting temperature and alters the morphology of the bilayer in the gel phase. Ellipsometry measurements show that PMA adsorption lowers the phase transition temperature by 2.4 degrees C. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) sh...

Cascading failures cause blackouts with high social costs. A cascading failure can be thought of as an alternating sequence of equipment outages and constraintviolations. We describe a network of fast-acting, autonomous agents for shortening such sequences. The agents work by eliminating violations before they can cause further outages. They make their decisions with DMPC—a distributed adaptati...

X-ray diffraction data taken at high instrumental resolution were obtained for EPC and DMPC under various osmotic pressures, primarily at T = 30 degrees C. The headgroup thickness DHH was obtained from relative electron density profiles. By using volumetric results and by comparing to gel phase DPPC we obtain areas AEPCF = 69.4 +/- 1.1 A2 and ADMPCF = 59.7 +/- 0.2 A2. The analysis also gives es...

Quinidine (QUIN) is one of the most important and efficient antiarrhythmic drugs (AAD). It belongs to class I, which are the drugs that exert their action at the level of the sodium channels in the membrane of the myocard. Several hypotheses support the idea that the molecular mechanism of action of the AAD is via nonspecific interactions with phospholipids sited in the neighborhood of the chan...

Small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) measurements are performed on pure dimyristoyl phosphatidylcholine (DMPC) unilamellar vesicles (ULV) and those containing either 20 or 47 mol% cholesterol, ergosterol or lanosterol. From the SANS data, we were able to determine the influence of these sterols on ULV bilayer thickness and vesicle area expansion coefficients. While these parameters have been d...