Negatively charged phospholipids are an important component of biological membranes. The thermodynamic parameters governing self-assembly of anionic phospholipids are deduced here from isothermal titration calorimetry. Heats of demicellization were determined for dioctanoyl phosphatidylglycerol (PG) and phosphatidylserine (PS) at different ionic strengths, and for dioctanoyl phosphatidic acid a...

The design, fabrication and testing of a micromachined shock sensor array is described. The sense elements are cantilevers which deflect parallel to the substrate and close a switch when a threshold acceleration is detected. Criteria for their dimensional optimization are presented. The dynamic range for the array is 10 g to 150 g, with a resolution of 10 g. Provisions for electrostatic self-te...

We apply atomic force microscope for local electrostatic charging of oxygen-terminated nanocrystalline diamond (NCD) thin films deposited on silicon, to induce electrostatically driven self-assembly of colloidal alumina nanoparticles into micro-patterns. Considering possible capacitive, sp2 phase and spatial uniformity factors to charging, we employ films with sub-100 nm thickness and about 60%...

Electrostatic correlation effects near charged planar surfaces immersed in a symmetric electrolytes solution are systematically studied by numerically solving the nonlinear six-dimensional electrostatic self-consistent equations. We compare our numerical results with widely accepted mean-field (MF) theory results, and find that the MF theory remains quantitatively accurate only in weakly charge...

The electrostatic influence of the central cavity and pore alpha helices in the potassium ion channel from Streptomyces lividans (KcsA K+ channel) was analyzed by solving the finite difference Poisson equation. The cavity and helices overcome the destabilizing influence of the membrane and stabilize a cation at the membrane center. The electrostatic effect of the pore helices is large compared ...

The electrostatic contribution to the twist rigidity of DNA is studied, and it is shown that the Coulomb self-energy of the double-helical sugar-phosphate backbone makes a considerable contribution-the electrostatic twist rigidity of DNA is found to be C(elec) approximately 5 nm, which makes up about 7% of its total twist rigidity ( C(DNA) approximately 75 nm). The electrostatic twist rigidity ...