Water is a fundamental solvent sustaining life, key to the conformations and equilibria associated with solute species. Emerging studies on nucleation and crystallization phenomena reveal that the dynamics of hydration associated with mineral precursors are critical in determining material formation and growth. With certain small molecules affecting the hydration and conformational stability of...

Setaria viridis is a C4 grass used as a model for bioenergy feedstocks. The elongating internodes in developing S. viridis stems grow from an intercalary meristem at the base, and progress acropetally toward fully expanded cells that store sugar. During stem development and maturation, water flow is a driver of cell expansion and sugar delivery. As aquaporin proteins are implicated in regulatin...

The equilibrium distribution of 14 sugars, sugar alcohols, and other nonelectrolytes in solutions of polyethylene oxide (PEO) and of native and alkali-denatured bovine hemoglobin were studied over wide concentration ranges. The results show that the equilibrium concentrations of all the solutes studies are rectilinearly related to their external concentrations. This straight-line relationship d...

Severe dehydration is lethal for most biological species. However, there are a number of organisms which have evolved mechanisms to avoid damage during dehydration. One of these mechanisms is the accumulation of small solutes (e.g. sugars), which have been shown to preserve membranes by inhibiting deleterious phase changes at low hydration. Specifically, sugars reduce the gel to fluid phase tra...

Sweetened condensed milk is a popular food in various climatic zones, including those regions where average winter temperature falls below –30°C. Such low temperatures can trigger crystallization because they disrupt the native structure of biopolymers. These processes spoil quality sweetened milk. However, no scientific publications feature cryoscopic sweet or systematize data on its low-tempe...

When crops are exposed to drought there is commonly an increase in solute-pool of the plant tissue. A series of experiments were conducted in 1994 and 1995 in the University of Hohenheim, Germany, to evaluate whether drought-induced solute accumulation per se will improve drought resistance, to determine the species of active osmotica involved, and to identify alternative mechanisms in grain le...

density (r/g cm-3) and viscosity (h/10-2gcm-1s-1=1centipoise,cp) of guanosine monophosphate (gmp) and adenosine triphosphate (atp) referred to as nucleotide, and 2-deoxy adenosine (doa) and thymidine (tmd) as nucleoside along with their integral furanose sugar, 2-deoxy ribose (dor) from 0.0004 to 0.0014mol kg-1 solution have been measured at 288.15, 293.15 and 298.15k at atmospheric pressure. t...

We present a comprehensive analysis of carbohydrate uptake systems of the soil bacterium Mycobacterium smegmatis and the human pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Our results show that M. smegmatis has 28 putative carbohydrate transporters. The majority of sugar transport systems (19/28) in M. smegmatis belong to the ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporter family. In contrast to previous report...

The plant-parasitic nematode Heterodera schachtii stimulates plant root cells to form syncytial feeding structures which synthesize all nutrients required for successful nematode development. Cellular re-arrangements and modified metabolism of the syncytia are accompanied by massive intra- and intercellular solute allocations. In this study the expression of all genes annotated as sugar transpo...