Protein toxins produced by bacteria are the cause of many life-threatening diarrheal diseases. Many of these toxins, including cholera toxin (CT), enter the cell by first binding to glycolipids in the cell membrane. Inhibiting these multivalent protein/carbohydrate interactions would prevent the toxin from entering cells and causing diarrhea. Here we demonstrate that the site-specific modificat...

Multivalent protein binding plays an important role not only in biological recognition but also in biosensor preparation. Infrared reflection absorption spectroscopy and surface plasmon resonance techniques have been used to investigate concanavalin A (Con A) binding to binary monolayers composed of 1,2-di-O-hexadecyl-sn-glycerol and derived glycolipids with the mannose moieties. The glycolipid...

Digital documents have advanced only slightly from their non-digital ancestors, incorporating a few such innovations as hypertext links andfull text searching. Even the much heralded advent of multimedia, just as embedded images and video clips, are rather straightforward digital analogs of books and frim. We believe that computer technology makes possible far more interesting and complex digit...

The inverse Schulze-Hardy rule was recently proposed based on experimental observations. This rule describes an interesting situation of the aggregation of charged colloidal particles in the presence of the multivalent coions. Specifically, it can be shown that the critical coagulation concentration is inversely proportional to the coion valence. Here the derivation of the inverse Schulze-Hardy...

We discuss the distribution of ions around highly charged PEs when there is competition between monovalent and multivalent ions, pointing out that in this case the number of condensed ions is sensitive to short-range interactions, salt and model-dependent approximations. This sensitivity is discussed in the context of recent experiments on DNA aggregation, induced by multivalent counterions suc...

This report highlights the advantages of low-affinity, multivalent interactions to recognize one cell type over another. Our goal was to devise a strategy to mediate selective killing of tumor cells, which are often distinguished from normal cells by their higher levels of particular cell surface receptors. To test whether multivalent interactions could lead to highly specific cell targeting, w...