Seminal plasma from ejaculates of 10 healthy, fertile volunteers and 63 infertile males was analysed for superoxide dismutase (SOD) and xanthine oxidase (XO) activities using a chemiluminometer. There was not statistically significant difference in the activity of either enzyme between control and infertile populations (113 +/- 74 IU/ml for SOD and 1.17 +/- 0.52 IU/ml for XO) in samples from no...

Cytochrome P-450 can metabolize arachidonic (5,8,11,14-eicosatetraenoic) acid to four epoxides. One of them, cis-5(6)oxido-8,11,14-eicosatrienoic acid, has been reported to possess biological activity. To ascertain whether this epoxide could be a substrate for the enzyme fatty acid cyclooxygenase, synthetic 3H-labeled cis-5(6)-oxido-8,11,14-eicosatrienoic acid was incubated with microsomes of r...

Several enzymes of plant sterol or triterpenoid biosynthesis involve during their catalysis postulated or demonstrated carbocationic high energy intermediates. It has been demonstrated previously that the design of transition state or high energy intermediate analogues could lead to powerful and specific inhibitors of enzymes. The aim of the present study was to interfere with plant sterol or t...

The structural and electronic properties of a series of manganese complexes with terminal oxido ligands are described. The complexes span three different oxidation states at the manganese center (III-V), have similar molecular structures, and contain intramolecular hydrogen-bonding networks surrounding the Mn-oxo unit. Structural studies using X-ray absorption methods indicated that each comple...

The advent of Multi Drug Resistant (MDR) strain of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB) necessitated search for new drug targets for the bacterium. It is reported that 3.3% of all new tuberculosis cases had multidrug resistance (MDR-TB) in 2009 and each year, about 0.44 million MDR-TB cases are estimated to emerge and 0.15 million people with MDR-TB die. Keeping such an alarming situation under cons...

This study presents the first systematic investigation of the anti-diabetic properties of non-oxido V(IV) complexes. In particular, the insulin-mimetic activity of [V(IV)(taci)2](4+), [V(IV)(inoH-3)2](2-), [V(IV)(dhab)2], [V(IV)(hyph(Ph))2], [V(IV)(cat)3](2-) and [V(IV)(pdbh)2]--where taci is 1,3,5-triamino-1,3,5-trideoxy-cis-inositol, ino is cis-inositol, H2dhab is 2,2'-dihydroxyazobenzene, H2...

Understanding the effect of redox-inactive metals on the properties of biological and heterogeneous water oxidation catalysts is important both fundamentally and for improvement of future catalyst designs. In this work, heterometallic manganese-oxido cubane clusters [MMn3O4] (M = Sr(2+), Zn(2+), Sc(3+), Y(3+)) structurally relevant to the oxygen-evolving complex (OEC) of photosystem II were pre...

The mixed-valence μ-oxide Sn12 cluster, deca-carbonyl-tetra-μ4-oxido-hexa-μ3-oxido-tetra-kis-[μ-2,2'-(pyridine-2,6-di-yl)bis(1,1-di-phenyl-ethano-lato)]deca-tin(II)ditin(IV)dimolyb-denum(O)(2 Mo-Sn) toluene hepta-solvate, [Mo2Sn12(C33H27NO2)4O10(CO)10]·7C7H8, has a crystallographically imposed inversion centre. The asymmetric unit also contains three and a half toluene solvent mol-ecules, one o...