Complex coacervation, a liquid-liquid phase separation that occurs when two oppositely charged polyelectrolytes are mixed in a solution, has the potential to be exploited for many emerging applications including wet adhesives and drug delivery vehicles. The ultra-low interfacial tension of coacervate systems against water is critical for such applications, and it would be advantageous if molecu...

Liquid:vapor and liquid:liquid interfaces exhibit complex organizational structure and dynamics at the molecular level. In the case of water and organic solvents, the hydrophobicity of the organic, its conformational flexibility, and compressibility, all influence interfacial properties. This work compares the interfacial tension, width, molecular conformations and orientations at the vapor and...

Aqueous solutions of alcohols are interesting because of their anomalous behavior that is believed to be due to the molecular structuring of water and alcohol around each other in solution. The interfacial structuring and properties are significant for application in alcohol purification processes and biomolecular structure. Here we study aqueous mixtures of short alcohols (methanol, ethanol, 1...

Kalata B1 has been demonstrated to have bioactivity relating to membrane disruption. In this study, we conducted coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations to gain further insight into kB1 bioactivity. The simulations were performed at various concentrations of kB1 to capture the overall progression of its activity. Two configurations of kB1 oligomers, termed tower-like and wall-like cluster...

Heterogeneous catalysis often involves charge transfer from catalyst surface to adsorbed molecules, whose activity thus depends on the surface charge density of catalysts. Here, we demonstrate a unique solution-phase approach to achieve controllable interfacial lengths in oxide-metal hybrid structures. Resulting from their different work functions, surface polarization is induced by the Ag-CuO ...

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...

Tumour-stromal interactions are a determining factor in cancer progression. In vivo, the interaction interface is associated with spatially resolved distributions of cancer and stromal phenotypes. Here, we establish a micropatterned tumour-stromal assay (μTSA) with laser capture microdissection to control the location of co-cultured cells and analyse bulk and interfacial tumour-stromal signalli...

Loss of activity through aggregation and surface-induced denaturation is a significant problem in the production, formulation and administration of therapeutic proteins. Surfactants are commonly used in upstream and downstream processing and drug formulation. However, the effectiveness of a surfactant strongly depends on its mechanism(s) of action and properties of the protein and interfaces. S...

We recently described 10 peptides selected from a 16,384-member combinatorial library based on their ability to permeabilize synthetic lipid vesicles in vitro. These peptides did not share a common sequence motif, length, or net charge; nonetheless, they shared a mechanism of action that is similar to the natural membrane permeabilizing antimicrobial peptides (AMP). To characterize the selected...

the adsorption of 2-mercaptobenzimidazole (2-mbi) on au(111) has been studied withcyclic voltammetry (cv), in-situ subtractively normalised interfacial ft-ir spectroscopy (sniftirs)and scanning tunnelling microscopy (stm). although adsorbed 2-mbi reduces the interfacial capacityand quenches the characteristic features of the cyclic voltammogram for sulfate adsorption,heterogeneous electron tran...