Most of the biological processes in living systems involve molecular adsorption and transport at biomembranes. It is highly desired to study the time-resolved transport kinetics through living cell membranes. In this thesis, an experimental means based on a nonlinear optical phenomenon, Second Harmonic Generation (SHG) has been demonstrated to detect the molecular adsorption and transport throu...

A multistep surface modification procedure for the creation of DNA arrays on chemically modified gold surfaces that can be used in surface plasmon resonance (SPR) imaging studies of protein-DNA interactions is demonstrated. The multistep procedure is required to create an array of spots that are surrounded first by a hydrophobic background which allows for the pinning of aqueous DNA solutions o...

Treatment of stormwater via sorption has the potential to remove both colloidal and dissolved pollutants. Previous research shows that activated carbon produced from sewage sludge is very efficient in sorbing hydrophobic organic compounds (HOCs), frequently detected in stormwater. The aim of this research was to determine whether the presence of dissolved organic matter (DOM) has a negative eff...

The adsorption of the lactonic (LS) and acidic (AS) forms of sophorolipid and their mixtures with the anionic surfactant sodium dodecyl benzene sulfonate (LAS) has been measured at the air/water interface by neutron reflectivity, NR. The AS and LS sophorolipids adsorb with Langmuir-like adsorption isotherms. The more hydrophobic LS is more surface active than the AS, with a lower critical micel...

Spreading of aqueous surfactant solution droplets over hydrophobic substrates proceeds in one slow stage at concentration of surfactants below some critical value and in two stages if the surfactant concentration is above the critical value: the fast and relatively short first stage is followed by a slower second stage. It is shown that the kinetics of a slow spreading at concentrations below t...

We introduce a two-dimensional lattice model of immobilization and stabilization of proteinlike polymers using grafted polymers. The protein is designed to have a specific bulk conformation reproducing a catalytic cleft of natural enzymes. Our model predicts a first order denaturing adsorption transition of free proteins. On the other hand, for an immobilized protein we observe a more gradual d...

Sodium bentonite was subjected to the effect of two new homologue series of chlorides (alcoxymethyl) dimethyloctyloamonium chlorides and 3-alcoxymethyl-1-octylimidazole chlorides with the hydrophobic substituents of the same length. Morphology of the obtained modified bentonite was studied under scanning electron microscope [SEM] and the degree of adsorption of the ammonium salts was determined...

A comparative study of the physical adsorption of RNAse A and RNAse Bacillus pumilis onto a negatively charged surface of mica, a hydrophobic surface of pyrolytic graphite and a surface of lipid layers of dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine (DPPC) was performed by atomic force microscopy. It was found that microbial RNAse, unlike RNAse A, 1) is adsorbed onto the negatively charged surface of mica in...

Adsorption of chemically radiolabeled [14C] collagen from binary mixtures with albumin or fibrinogen was studied on the solution/air and solution/polyethylene interfaces and revealed the preferential adsorption of albumin. This phenomenon is confirmed by the data of surface tension measurements of single protein, collagen-albumin, and collagen-fibrinogen solutions. Desorption experiments clearl...

In this study we investigated the interaction behavior between thirteen different small peptides and a hydrophobic surface using three progressively more complex methods of representing solvation effects: a united-atom implicit solvation method [CHARMM 19 force field (C19) with Analytical Continuum Electrostatics (ACE)], an all-atom implicit solvation method (C22 with GBMV), and an all-atom exp...