The antibacterial activity against Staphylococcus aureus of long-chain fatty alcohols was investigated, with a focus on normal alcohols. The antibacterial activity varied with the length of the aliphatic carbon chain and not with the water/octanol partition coefficient. 1-Nonanol, 1-decanol and 1-undecanol had bactericidal activity and membrane-damaging activity. 1-Dodecanol and 1-tridecanol ha...

Alcohols are known modulators of lipid bilayer properties. Their biological effects have long been attributed to their bilayer-modifying effects, but alcohols can also alter protein function through direct protein interactions. This raises the question: Do alcohol's biological actions result predominantly from direct protein-alcohol interactions or from general changes in the membrane propertie...

Urinary excretion of bile alcohols and bile acids in patients with complete extrahepatic cholestasis before and after the release by external biliary drainage was studied. Following extraction, isolation, and hydrolysis, bile alcohols were determined by capillary gas-liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry as dimethylethylsilyl derivatives. During cholestasis, 8.89 mumol/day of bile alcohol and...

Aliphatic alcohols of chain lengths of 24–34 carbons have been found to be beneficial in treating hypercholesterolemia. Approximately 40% of beeswax is long-chain esters which can be transesterified in supercritical carbon dioxide to give these alcohols and fatty acid methyl esters. The methanolysis reaction was catalyzed by an immobilized lipase from Candida antarctica in flowing supercritical...

The enantioselective oxidation of secondary alcohols represents a valuable approach for the synthesis optically pure compounds. Flavoprotein oxidases can catalyse such selective transformations by merely using oxygen as electron acceptor. While many flavoprotein preferably act on primary alcohols, FAD-containing alcohol oxidase from Phanerochaete chrysosporium was found to be able perform kinet...

Regulation of histone acetylation is fundamental to the utilization of eukaryotic genomes in chromatin. Aberrant acetylation contributes to disease and can be clinically combated by inhibiting the responsible enzymes. Our knowledge of the histone acetylation system is patchy because we so far lacked the methodology to describe acetylation patterns and their genesis by integrated enzyme activiti...

Reversible acetylation of α-tubulin is an evolutionarily conserved modification in microtubule networks. Despite its prevalence, the physiological function and regulation of microtubule acetylation remain poorly understood. Here we report that macrophages challenged by bacterial lipopolysaccharides (LPS) undergo extensive microtubule acetylation. Suppression of LPS-induced microtubule acetylati...

After more than a century of research on resorcin[4]arenes (1) it is clear that such systems form spontaneously [1(6)(H(2)O)(8)]-type hexameric capsules in wet, non-polar, organic solvents. However, the interactions of these hexameric capsules with alcohols are far from being solved. Here we provide the results of an extensive study on the interaction of different alcohols with the hexameric ca...

The dispersion of single wall carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) in solvents and their processability are of importance for various practical applications of SWNTs but have not been fully achieved yet. Here, we report the homogeneous and stable dispersion of individually isolated SWNT in alcohols using surfactant-aided noncovalent functionalization. This is the first utilization of surfactants for the di...

Steroidal allylic alcohols formed Na+ adduct ion peaks [M+Na]+ by the addition of NaCl in FAB mass spectrometry. A comparison of the intensities of the adduct ion peaks of allylic alcohols with those of the corresponding saturated alcohols and olefin suggested that the olefinic double bond and the proximal hydroxyl group had coordinated to Na+. The adduct ion was stable and did not undergo dehy...