The motile tips of growing axons are called growth cones. Growth cones lead navigating axons through developing tissues by interacting with locally expressed molecular guidance cues that bind growth cone receptors and regulate the dynamics and organization of the growth cone cytoskeleton. The main target of these navigational signals is the actin filament meshwork that fills the growth cone per...

Matrix adhesions provide critical signals for cell growth or differentiation. They form through a number of distinct steps that follow integrin binding to matrix ligands. In an early step, integrins form clusters that support actin polymerization by an unknown mechanism. This raises the question of how actin polymerization occurs at the integrin clusters. We report here that a major formin in m...

The condition of oligo-micelle formation of sodium di-isodecyl sulfosuccinate (SDIDS) emulsifier in hydroalcoholic solutions is used to study particle formation of vinyl chloride emulsion polymerization in a batch reactor. The change on micellization behavior was investigated by critical micelle concentration (CMC) and zeta potential parameters. To detect the occurrence of secondary nucleation ...

Polystyrene-silica core-shell composite particles are prepared by one-step emulsion polymerization with a nonionic initiator VA-086, solely stabilized by silica nanoparticles. The silica nanoparticles are successfully incorporated as the shell, likely due to the fact that the nanoparticles are thermodynamically favorable to adsorb and remain at the liquid-liquid interfaces during the emulsion p...

A joint experimental/theoretical study has been carried out on the putative MMA polymerization catalyzed by an yttrium isopropyloxide complex. Despite its high activity in lactone polymerization, this catalyst is found to be unreactive on methyl methacrylate (MMA) polymerization. This surprising result is rationalized using a computational approach at the DFT level. Indeed, the endothermicity o...

Poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) hydrogels are widely used to deliver therapeutic biomolecules, due to high hydrophilicity, tunable physicochemical properties, and anti-fouling properties. Although different hydrogel crosslinking mechanisms are known to result in distinct network structures, it is still unknown how these various mechanisms influence biomolecule release. Here we compared the effects ...

As a first step to understand anomalous kinetic roughening with multifractality in recent experiments of the vapor deposition polymerization (VDP) growth, we study a simple toy model of the VDP growth in a (1+1)-dimensional lattice, along with monomer diffusion, polymer nucleation, limited active end bonding, and shadowing effects. Using extensive numerical simulations, we observe that the glob...

Abstract Chain polymerizations are defined as chain reactions where the propagation steps occur by reaction between monomer(s) and active site(s) on polymer chains with regeneration of at each step. Many forms polymerization can be distinguished according to mechanism step (e.g., cyclopolymerization – when rings formed, condensative is a condensation reaction, group-transfer polymerization, pol...

We examined the nucleated polymerization of actin from the two ends of filaments that comprise the microvillus (MV) core in intestinal epithelial cells by electron microscopy. Three different in vitro preparations were used to nucleate the polymerization of muscle G-actin: (a) MV core fragments containing "barbed" and "pointed" filament ends exposed by shear during isolation, (b) isolated, memb...