Extraction of Amino Acid Enantiomers with Microemulsions

The enantioselective extractions of phenylalanine and tryptophane with oil‐in‐water microemulsion were investigated, where Igepal CO‐630 was used as a non‐ionic surfactant and cyclohexane was employed as the organic phase. N‐heptyl‐L‐hydroxyproline, N‐decyl‐L‐hydroxyproline and N‐hexadecyl‐L‐hydroxyproline were used as hydrophobic chiral selectors and immobilized in the microemulsion droplets. In order to investigate the complexation chemistry, experiments were performed at different conditions by varying the initial concentrations of the enantiomers, pH values and composition of the microemulsion. As a result, the enatioselectivity for tryptophane was seen to be higher than for phenylalanine with all three selectors.     

Verified Computation of Fast Decreasing Polynomials

In this paper the problem of verified numerical computation of algebraic fast decreasing polynomials approximating the Dirac delta function is considered. We find the smallest degree of the polynomials and give precise estimates for this degree. It is shown that the computer algebra system Maple does not always graph such polynomials reliably because of evaluating the expressions in usual floating-point arithmetic. We propose a procedure for verified computation of the polynomials and use it to produce their correct graphic presentation in Maple.     

Thin CdSe films obtained by the method of chemical deposition with selenurea

The conditions for obtaining thin polycrystalline CdSe films from the chemical interaction in water of a cadmium salt and selenurea have been studied. The influences of the concentrations of the reagents, the pH of the reaction mixture and the temperature on the thickness of the deposited films, their adhesion to the substrate, and their composition and properties have been investigated.     

Direct capacitance measurements of small geometry MOS transistors

Methods for measuring the intrinsic capacitances of small geometry MOS transistors are described. The influence of short- and narrow-channel effects on the capacitance characteristics of MOS transistors is evaluated. The results are compared with long-channel devices. It is shown that the presented capacitance methods can be used to study the physics of short-channel transistors.     

Über die Distributivgesetze der erweiterten Intervallarithmetik

Further relations between the operations in the extended interval arithmetic are discussed in this paper. In particular, the distributive laws in the extended arithmetic are considered, that is it is shown how to present expressions of the form(A?B) C, (A+B)/C, (A?B)/C etc. in an equivalent form. As a special case the well-known distributive laws for the usual interval operations are obtained.     

Adenoviral Gene Delivery from Multilayered Polyelectrolyte Architectures

The alternate layer‐by‐layer (LBL) deposition of polycations and polyanions for the build up of multilayered polyelectrolyte films is an original approach that allows the preparation of tunable, biologically active surfaces. The resulting supramolecular nanoarchitectures can be functionalized with drugs, peptides, and proteins, or DNA molecules that are able to transfect cells in vitro. We monitor, for the first time, the embedding of a bioactive adenoviral (Ad) vector in multilayered polyelectrolyte films. Ad efficiently adsorbs on poly(L ‐lysine)–poly(L ‐glutamic acid) (PLL–PGA), PLL–HA (HA: hyaluronan), poly(allylamin hydrochloride)–poly(sodium‐4‐styrenesulfonate) (PAH–PSS), and CHI–HA (CHI: chitosan) films; it preserves its transduction capacity (which can reach 95 %) for a large number of cell types, and also allows vector uptake into receptor‐deficient cells, thus abrogating the restricted tropism of Ad.     

Seasonal variations on energy yield of a‐Si,hybrid, and crystalline Si PV modules

This paper presents a study of long‐term outdoor performance of a‐Si and hybrid modules mounted in the same location over several years. The modules were also characterized indoors using standard measurement methods employing pulsed solar simulators at the European Solar Test Installation (ESTI). The present study is intended to contribute to future standards on energy rating by presenting a common procedure for correcting the outdoor performance measurements to standard test conditions and comparing the resulting module performance at real and laboratory conditions. A seasonal variation in output, higher in the summer and lower in the winter, suggests that the module performance improves due to annealing when the module temperature is higher. The total output energy per month for these two technologies and a reference c‐Si technology is also presented. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bright fluorescent dsDNA probes: novel polycationic asymmetric monomethine cyanine dyes based on thiazolopyridine‐quinolinium chromophore

Seven tri‐ and tetracationic monomeric and homodimeric monomethine cyanine dyes based on thiazolo[4,5‐b]pyridinium and quinolinium end groups were synthesised and characterised. The dyes were tested as fluorescent DNA intercalating probes to apply in DNA gel electrophoresis. The DNA samples stained with all dyes from the series demonstrated bright fluorescent signals. DNA fragments were successfully visualised under orange and green filters as well as under standard UV transillumination. Two of the studied dyes revealed higher sensitivity to DNA when compared with the commercial dimeric cyanine dye TOTO‐1. Their sensitivity reached that of the commercial dimeric cyanine dye YOYO‐1, but the emission was shifted to longer wavelengths. These qualities make the dyes suitable to apply in a wide range of medical and scientific analytical methods.     

Efficiently supporting order in XML query processing

XML is an ordered data model and XQuery expressions return results that have a well-defined order. However, little work on how order is supported in XML query processing has been done to date. In this paper we study the issues related to handling order in the XML context, namely challenges imposed by the XML data model, the variety of order requirements of the XQuery language, and the need to maintain order in the presence of updates to the XML data. We propose an efficient solution that addresses all these issues. Our solution is based on a key encoding for XML nodes that serves as node identity and at the same time encodes order. We design rules for encoding order of processed XML nodes based on the XML algebraic query execution model and the node key encoding. These rules do not require any actual sorting for intermediate results during execution. Our approach enables efficient order-sensitive incremental view maintenance as it makes most XML algebra operators distributive with respect to bag union. We prove the correctness of our order encoding approach. Our approach is implemented and integrated with Rainbow, an XML data management system developed at WPI. We have tested the efficiency of our approach using queries that have different order requirements. We have also measured the relative cost of different components related to our order solution in different types of queries. In general the overhead of maintaining order in our approach is very small relative to the query processing time.