Amoebae have been considered as a genetic "melting pot" for its symbionts, facilitating genetic exchanges of the bacteria that co-inhabit the same host. To test the "melting pot" hypothesis, we analyzed six genomes of amoeba endosymbionts within Rickettsiales, four of which belong to Holosporaceae family and two to Candidatus Midichloriaceae. For the first time, we identified plasmids in obliga...

Strand separation is a fundamental molecular process essential for the reading of the genetic information during DNA replication, transcription and recombination. However, DNA melting in physiological conditions in which the double helix is expected to be stable represents a challenging problem. Current models propose that negative supercoiling destabilizes the double helix and promotes the spo...

The mechanism by which anaesthetics work is much discussed. The most prevalent view is that anaesthetics bind to ligand gated ion channels thereby restricting their function. Another view is that anaesthetics interact directly with the cell membrane, changing properties of the membrane leading to a conformational change in the membrane proteins which causes anaesthesia. In this thesis we will i...

A novel preparing method of polymer-coated molybdenum powder was presented. A type of multi-component polymer-coated molybdenum powder was chosen for selective laser sintering. The effect of the process parameters on the part’s characteristics is investigated. Based on our study for dynamic laser sintering process of polymer-coated molybdenum powder, its laser sintering mechanism was reported a...

We investigate melting of stripe phases in the overdoped regime x > 0.3 of the two-dimensional t-t-U Hubbard model, using a spin rotation invariant form of the slave boson representation. We show that the spin and charge order disappear simultaneously, and discuss a mechanism stabilizing bond-centered and site-centered stripe structures.

We report sublimation of crystalline GeTe nanowires at elevated temperatures in vacuum imaged by in situ transmission electron microscopy. The GeTe nanowires exhibit significant melting point suppression in the presence of Au contamination. A nanosized effusion cell is formed by coating the GeTe core with a SiO(2) shell, where the core can be evaporated or sublimated from the open end of the sh...

Surface free energy is a criterion usually employed to identify the stability of a solid surface. Nanoparticles of face-centered cubic (fcc) noble metals are usually enclosed by the lowerenergy surfaces such as {111} and {100}, because these surfaces are believed to have the lowest energy, typically following g{111}<g{100}<g{110}. This criterion is proposed based on the assumption that the surf...