Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a severe muscle wasting disease caused by a mutation in the gene for dystrophin--a cytoskeletal protein connecting the contractile machinery to a group of proteins in the cell membrane. At the end stage of the disease there is profound muscle weakness and atrophy. However, the early stage of the disease is characterised by increased membrane permeability which all...

photocatalytic membranes exhibit great potential for water treatment since they combine the filtration and photo degradation in a single unit. although blending photocatalytic nanoparticles into polymeric thin film remains the simplest method to prepare the photocatalytic membrane, the entrapped photocatalyst showed less catalytic activity due to the agglomeration and shielding effects in the p...

Detergents have several biological applications but present cytotoxicity concerns, since they can solubilize cell membranes. Using the IonFlux 16, an ensemble whole cell planar patch clamp, we observed that anionic sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS), cationic cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB), and cationic, fluorescent octadecyl rhodamine B (ORB) increased the membrane permeability of cells subst...

Transient physical disruption of cell membranes by electric pulses (or electroporation) has significance in biomedical and biological applications requiring the delivery exogenous (bio)molecules to living cells. We demonstrate that actin networks regulate membrane permeability during electroporation. Disruption increases uptake membrane-impermeable molecules such as propidium iodide Our experim...

Sorghum is among the most important forages used in arid and semi-arid regions of south-eastern Iran. Application of some materials such as super absorbent polymer (SAP) in soil can increase soil water storage capacity and increase water use efficiency. The aim of the study was to estimate the relative membrane permeability of sorghum under irrigation regimes and superabsorbent polymer applicat...

A micro space technique for determining membrane permeability in Rickettsia prowazeki is described and justified. The cell water, cell wall plus periplasmic volume, and glutamate, ethylene glycol, and adenosine diphosphate permeabilities were determined by this method. The effect of nonionic detergents on rickettsial permeability was examined: Triton X-100 destroyed the permeability barrier, wh...

To investigate the mechanism of azalomycin F5a against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), the conductivity of MRSA suspension and the adenylate kinase activity of MRSA culture were determined with the intervention of azalomycin F5a, which were significantly increased compared to those of blank controls. This inferred that azalomycin F5a could lead to the leakage of cellular sub...

Despite the availability and prosperity of chemotherapeutic agents, multidrug resistance (MDR) remains paramount obstacle in antitumor chemotherapy. Here, a natural killer (NK) cell-biomimetic nanoparticle (DMLN) is developed to overcome MDR by promoting entry doxorubicin (DOX) into tumor cells via cascade catalysis. DMLN synthesized compounding NK cell membrane with hollow MnO2 nanoparticles l...