My collaborators and I [2] study selectivity in ion channels. Ion channels are proteins with a hole down their middle that are the (nano nearly pico)valves of life. Ion channels control an enormous range of biological function in health and disease. A large amount of data is available about selectivity in many channels. Selectivity in ion channels occurs without structural change of the channel...

UNLABELLED The existence of color-processing regions in the human ventral visual pathway (VVP) has long been known from patient and imaging studies, but their location in the cortex relative to other regions, their selectivity for color compared with other properties (shape and object category), and their relationship to color-processing regions found in nonhuman primates remain unclear. We add...

Nanopore size, shape, and surface charge all play important roles in regulating ionic transport through nanoporous membranes. The ability to control these parameters in situ provides a means to create ion transport systems tunable in real time. Here, we present a new strategy to address this challenge, utilizing three unique electrochemically switchable chemistries to manipulate the terminal fu...

We investigated the binocular properties of curvature-encoding mechanisms using the shape-frequency and shape-amplitude after-effects (or SFAE and SAAE). The SFAE and SAAE refer to the shifts observed in, respectively, the shape-frequency and shape-amplitude of a sinusoidal test contour following adaptation to a contour with different shape-frequency/shape-amplitude. We examined (i) the contrib...

Three shape-persistent aromatic hydrazide macrocycles that bear phenylalanine tripeptide chains have been synthesized. These macrocycles can insert into lipid bilayers to form single-molecular ion channels which exhibit a high NH4(+)/K(+) selectivity.

A new tetrazolate zeolite-like framework with a diamond topology, UTSA-49, was synthesized. UTSA-49 shows high selectivity for CO2/CH4 and CO2/N2 indicating a synergistic effect of the suitable pore size/shape and functional groups.

We demonstrate the deterministic shape-selective synthesis and growth of CdSe nanowires, nanosaws and nanoribbons by a simple vapour-transport process in a tube furnace. The key step, in order to achieve reproducible shape selectivity for a given set of deposition parameters, is to exclude any effects of the temperature ramping. We prove that an efficient precursor-flow shutter is achieved just...

Object recognition in primates is mediated by the ventral visual pathway and is classically described as a feedforward hierarchy of increasingly sophisticated representations. Neurons in macaque monkey area V4, an intermediate stage along the ventral pathway, have been shown to exhibit selectivity to complex boundary conformation and invariance to spatial translation. How could such a represent...

This study focused on the response properties underlying selectivity for the rate of frequency modulated (FM) sweeps in the auditory cortex of anesthetized C57bl/6 (C57) mice. Linear downward FM sweeps with rates between 0.08 and 20 kHz/ms were tested. We show that at least two different response properties predict FM rate selectivity: sideband inhibition and duration tuning. Sideband inhibitio...