Despite tremendous advances in recent years, solution NMR remains fundamentally restricted due to its inherent insensitivity. Dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) potentially offers significant improvements in this respect. The basic DNP strategy is to irradiate the EPR transitions of a stable radical and transfer this nonequilibrium polarization to the hydrogen spins of water, which will in turn...

Perhaps 5%-10% of proteins bind to membranes via a covalently attached lipid. Posttranslational attachment of fatty acids such as myristate occurs on a variety of viral and cellular proteins. High-resolution information about the nature of lipidated proteins is remarkably sparse, often because of solubility problems caused by the exposed fatty acids. Reverse micelle encapsulation is used here t...

Integral membrane proteins remain a significant challenge to structural studies by solution NMR spectroscopy. This is due not only to spectral complexity, but also because the effects of slow molecular reorientation are exacerbated by the need to solubilize the protein in aqueous detergent micelles. These assemblies can be quite large and require deuteration for optimal use of the TROSY effect....

All-atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulations were performed to study the effects of different tetraalkylammonium (TAA(+)) counterions, including tetramethylammonium (TMA(+)), tetraethylammonium (TEA(+)), tetrapropylammonium (TPA(+)) and tetrabutylammonium (TBA(+)), on dodecyl sulfate (DS(-)) micelles. Structural properties, such as the radius of gyration (Rg), micelle radius (Rs), micelle size,...

Electrophoretic inks, which are suspensions of colorant particles that are controllably concentrated and dispersed by applied electric fields, are the leading commercial technology for high-quality reflective displays. Extending the state of the art for high-fidelity color in these displays requires improved understanding and control of the colloidal systems. In these inks, reverse micelles in ...

The structural characterization of integral membrane proteins represents one of the many challenges of the post-genomic era. While membrane proteins comprise approximately 50% of current and potential drug targets, their structural characterization lags far behind that of soluble proteins. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) offers tremendous potential for the investigation of membrane proteins in...

Reverse micelles are attractive nanoscale systems used for the confinement of molecules in studies of structure and chemical reactions, including protein folding, and aggregation. The simulation of reverse micelles, in which a water "pool" is separated from a nonpolar bulk phase by a surfactant layer, poses significant challenges to empirical force fields due to the diversity of interactions be...

Supramolecular reverse micelle assemblies, formed by amphiphilic copolymers, can selectively encapsulate molecules in their interiors depending on the functional groups present in the polymers. Altering the binding selectivity of these materials typically requires the synthesis of alternate functional groups. Here, we demonstrate that the addition of Zr(IV) ions to the interiors of reverse mice...

Mesoporous polymer materials were fabricated from micelle/polymer precursors prepared by the micelle template method in reverse microemulsion systems and the pore size could be tuned by varying the type and concentration of surfactant.