With the relatively new technique of coaxial electrospinning, composite fibres of poly(vinylpyrrolidone) with the liquid crystal 4-cyano-4'-octylbiphenyl in its smectic phase as core material could be produced. The encapsulation leads to remarkable confinement effects on the liquid crystal, inducing changes in its phase sequence. We conducted a series of experiments to determine the effect of v...

Polysaccharides, secondary metabolites and poly-phenolics are known to co-isolate with nucleic acids from plant tissues resulting in inhibition of molecular manipulations. RNA isolated from the polyphenolic-rich resurrection plant, Myrothamnus flabellifolius, was demonstrated to inhibit a standard polymerase chain reaction used as an assay despite the inclusion of the polyphenolic-binding compo...

Human hexosaminidase A was covalently bound to soluble poly(N-vinylpyrrolidone), and the effect of this binding on the enzyme inactivation by various procedures was investigated. Whereas the polymer-bound hexosaminidase underwent inactivation to the same extent as the free enzyme, when exposed to heat or acidic pH, the conjugation to polymer appeared to protect the enzyme towards proteolysis. T...

The synthesis of 5-substituted 6,6a-dihydroisoindolo[2,1-a]quinolin-11(5H)-ones via [4 + 2] imino-Diels-Alder cyclization from N-aryl-3-hydroxyisoindolinones and N-vinyl lactams under Lewis acid-catalysed anhydrous conditions is reported. Reactions of N-(2-substituted-aryl)-3-hydroxyisoindolinones with N-vinylpyrrolidone under identical conditions resulted in the formation of 2-(2-substitued-ar...

| In a note at the end of his paper Recherches sur les fractions continues, Stieltjes gave a necessary and suucient condition when a continued fraction is represented by a meromorphic function. This result is related to the study of compact Jacobi matrices. We indicate how this notion was developped and used since Stieltjes, with special attention to the results by M. G. Krein. We also pay atte...

GA (glucoamylase) hydrolyses starch and polysaccharides to beta-D-glucose. RoGA (Rhizopus oryzae GA) consists of two functional domains, an N-terminal SBD (starch-binding domain) and a C-terminal catalytic domain, which are connected by an O-glycosylated linker. In the present study, the crystal structures of the SBD from RoGA (RoGACBM21) and the complexes with beta-cyclodextrin (SBD-betaCD) an...