A novel assay was developed for the detection of Bacillus thuringiensis (BT) spores. The assay is based on the fluorescence observed after binding an aptamer-quantum dot conjugate to BT spores. The in vitro selection and amplification technique called SELEX (Systematic Evolution of Ligands by EXponential enrichment) was used in order to identify the DNA aptamer sequence specific for BT. The 60 ...

Soft micellar nanoparticles can be prepared from DNA conjugates designed to assemble via base pairing such that strands containing a polymer corona and a cholesterol tail generate controlled supramolecular architecture. Functionalization of one DNA conjugate strand with a biorecognition ligand results in shielding of the ligand when in the micelle, while encoding of the DNA sequences with overh...

where the values of the forward (kd) and reverse (kp) rate constants may be different from those in the ground state because of differences in the properties of the 2-naphthol in these two states (for example, Ka 6= K ∗ a in part I). The objective of this experiment is to determine the deprotonation/protonation rate constants of 2-naphthol in its lowest excited singlet state in aqueous solution...

We provide a first experimental verification of a theoretical prediction of a kinetic transition in a reversible binding reaction, AB right harpoon over left harpoon A+B, driven by the difference in effective lifetimes of the bound and the unbound states. We consider the kinetics of excited-state proton transfer to solvent from a photoacid whose conjugate anionic base possesses an extremely sho...

The gas-phase structure of the conjugate base of p-hydroxybenzoic acid (and related compounds) and the influence of the solvent used in its generation by electrospray ionization have recently been under debate. While the phenoxide structure is known to be lower in energy in the gas phase, the carboxylate structure is favored in aqueous solution, fuelling the controversy. Here we probe the struc...

On base of Hamiltonian formalism, we show that Hopf bifurcation arrives, in the course of the system evolution, at creation of revolving region of the phase plane being bounded by limit cycle. A revolving phase plane with a set of limit cycles is presented in analogy with revolving vessel containing superfluid He 4. Within such a representation, fast varying angle is shown to be reduced to phas...

Using PCR fragments of known sequences derived from isolates of two related fungal species, simple submarine electrophoresis in agarose gels containing a bisbenzimide-PEG conjugate (H.A.-Yellow) has been shown to be capable of distinguishing DNA fragments 567 bp long which differ by as little as a single base change. However, only changes affecting bisbenzimide binding sites (which consist of a...

Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment, 2012 he nitrate ion (NO3) (CAS No. 14797-55-8, atomic mass 62.0049 g·mol) is the most oxidized form of nitrogen (N) present in the environment with an oxidation state of +5 (NRC 1978). It is the conjugate base of nitric acid (HNO3), a strong acid which is completely dissociated in solution (NRC 1978). The nitrate salts of all common metals (e.g....

Several peptide nucleic acid based artificial nucleases (PNAzymes) are designed to create a bulge in the target RNA, which is a short model of the leukemia related bcr/abl mRNA. The target RNA is cleaved by the PNAzymes with a half-life of down to 11 h (using a 1 : 1 ratio of PNA-conjugate to target) and only upon base-pairing with the substrate. The PNA based systems are also shown to act in a...

In this paper, we present new variants of global bi-conjugate gradient (Gl-BiCG) and global bi-conjugate residual (Gl-BiCR) methods for solving nonsymmetric linear systems with multiple right-hand sides. These methods are based on global oblique projections of the initial residual onto a matrix Krylov subspace. It is shown that these new algorithms converge faster and more smoothly than the Gl-...