Micro/nanoparticles could cause adverse effects on cardiovascular system and increase the risk for cardiovascular disease-related events. Nanoparticles prepared from poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG)-b-poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL), namely PEG-b-PCL, a widely studied biodegradable copolymer, are promising carriers for the drug delivery systems. However, it is unknown whether polymeric PEG-b-PCL nano-mic...

The concept of lipase interfacial activation stems from the finding that the catalytic activity of most lipases depends on the aggregation state of their substrates. It is thought that activation involves the unmasking and structuring of the enzyme's active site through conformational changes requiring the presence of oil-in-water droplets. Here, we present the neutron structure of the activate...

Anisotropic nanoparticles prepared from block copolymers are of growing importance as building blocks for the creation of synthetic hierarchical materials. However, the assembly of these structural units is generally limited to the use of amphiphilic interactions. Here we report a simple, reversible coordination-driven hierarchical self-assembly strategy for the preparation of micron-scale fibr...

The conformational behaviors of charged brushes on a micelle self-assembled by charged-neutral diblock copolymers in salt-free solution are extensively analyzed using a coarse-grained dissipative particle dynamic (DPD) simulation. When only monovalent counterions exist, the brush conformation of the corona in the micelle is exactly consistent with the predictions from the blob-scaling theory ba...

The proton magnetic resonance spectrum of DL-a!-lecithin at 100 MHz in CHCJ solvent is reported. An analysis of the spectrum is made. The chemical shifts of the N-(CH& protons and the resonance peak associated with the condensed water molecule showed concentration dependence with the latter showing the more pronounced response. These chemical shift changes are interpreted in terms of micelle fo...

We report studies on diffusion controlled deligation and ligation dynamics of a probe ligand 4-(dicyanomethylene)-2-methyl-6-(p-dimethylamino-styryl) 4H-pyran (DCM) with cationic cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) micelles. In order to investigate the effect of spatial heterogeneity on the dynamics we study the DCM labeled micelle upon complexation with an enzyme alpha-chymotrypsin (CHT). Th...

A simple two order-paraIneter Ginzburg-Landau theory for binary mixtures of water and amphiphile is introduced. The amphiphile concentration is described by a scalar, the orientational degrees of freedom of the amphiphile by a vector order parameter. Phase diagrams are calculated by minimizing the free energy functional. Several ordered lyotropic phases of lamellar, hexagonal, inverse hexagonal...

Both long chain alkyl thiols and alkyl amines behave as size focusing agents for gold nanoparticles, a process that is under thermodynamic control. However, amines do not oxidize surface gold atoms while thiols do oxidize surface gold to gold(I) with evolution of hydrogen gas. Therefore, alkyl amines participate in digestive ripening by a different mechanism. The efficiency of alkyl amines for ...

The biphasic alkaline hydrolysis of ethyl caprylate (EC) exhibits highly nonlinear kinetics that has been attributed in the literature to “micellar autocatalysis” (Bachmann, P. A. et al. Nature 1992, 357, 57). New experimental results enable us to establish a macroscopic kinetic model quantitatively accounting for the dynamics of this reaction. According to the model, EC is carried from the org...

Descriptors in the Abraham equations for all the 209 PCBs have been obtained from literature chromatographic data. The six descriptors suffice for the prediction of water to octanol partitions, and for the prediction of various water to solvent and gas to solvent partitions, solubility in water, and water to micelle partition. For water to octanol, gas to dry octanol, gas to wet octanol, solubi...