Search results for " alignment"
showing 10 items of 587 documents
Ordering and dewetting in spin-coated films of a liquid crystalline main chain polymer
2006
Abstract The ordering of spin-coated films of a main-chain smectic liquid crystalline polymer with an azobenzene group connected by flexible spacers to a phenyl malonate unit has been studied as a function of film thickness using scanning force microscopy and UV/Vis spectroscopy. Already the as-prepared films are characterized by a significant out-of-plane orientation of the azobenzene groups. Annealing of films thicker than 7 nm results in aggregation and homeotropical alignment of azobenzene groups forming smectic layers parallel to the substrate. An optically isotropic mesophase was found upon annealing in the temperature range of smectic mesophase. Films thinner than the bilayer thickne…
Isotropic-nematic interface and wetting in suspensions of colloidal platelets.
2006
We study interfacial phenomena in a colloidal dispersion of sterically stabilized gibbsite platelets, exhibiting coexisting isotropic and nematic phases separated by a sharp horizontal interface. The nematic phase wets a vertical glass wall and polarized light micrographs reveal homeotropic surface anchoring both at the free isotropic-nematic interface and at the wall. On the basis of complete wetting of the wall by the nematic phase, as found in our density functional calculations and computer simulations, we analyze the balance between Frank elasticity and surface anchoring near the contact line. Because of weak surface anchoring, the director field in the capillary rise region is uniform…
Towards tunable defect arrangements in smectic liquid crystal shells utilizing the nematic–smectic transition in hybrid-aligned geometries
2012
We produce and investigate liquid crystal shells with hybrid alignment—planar at one boundary, homeotropic at the other—undergoing a transition between the nematic (N) and smectic-A (SmA) phases. The shells display a dynamic sequence of patterns, the details depending on the alignment agents and on the diameter and thickness of the shell. In shells of sufficient diameter we typically find a transient striped texture near the N–SmA transition, stabilising into a pattern of tiled, more or less regularly spaced focal conic domains in the SmA phase. The domain size and spacing decrease with reduced shell thickness. In case of strong homeotropic anchoring at one boundary and small shell size, ho…
Optically Probed Laser-Induced Field-Free Molecular Alignment
2011
Molecular alignment induced by laser fields has been investigated in research laboratories for over two decades. It led to a better understanding of the fundamental processes at play in the interaction of strong laser fields with molecules, and also provided significant contributions to the fields of high harmonic generation, laser spectroscopy, and laser filamentation. In this chapter, we discuss molecular alignment produced under field-free conditions, as resulting from the interaction of a laser pulse of duration shorter than the rotational period of the molecule. The experimental results presented will be confined to the optically probed alignment of linear as well as asymmetric top mol…
Better Actuation Through Chemistry: Using Surface Coatings to Create Uniform Director Fields in Nematic Liquid Crystal Elastomers.
2016
Controlling the molecular alignment of liquid crystal monomers (LCMs) within nano- and microstructures is essential in manipulating the actuation behavior of nematic liquid crystal elastomers (NLCEs). Here, we study how to induce uniformly vertical alignment of nematic LCMs within a micropillar array to maximize the macroscopic shape change using surface chemistry. Landau-de Gennes numerical modeling suggests that it is difficult to perfectly align LCMs vertically in every pore within a poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) mold with porous channels during soft lithography. In an untreated PDMS mold that provides homeotropic anchoring of LCMs, a radially escaped configuration of LCMs is observed. V…
Genes and derived amino acid sequences of S-layer proteins from mesophilic, thermophilic, and extremely thermophilic methanococci
2002
Cells of methanococci are covered by a single layer of protein subunits (S-layer) in hexagonal arrangement, which are directly exposed to the environment and which cannot be stabilized by cellular components. We have isolated S-layer proteins from cells of Methanococcus vannielii ( T(opt.)=37 degrees C), Methanococcus thermolithotrophicus ( T(opt.)=65 degrees C), and Methanococcus jannaschii ( T(opt.)=85 degrees C). The primary structure of the S-layer proteins was determined by sequencing the corresponding genes. According to the predicted amino acid sequence, the molecular masses of the S-layer proteins of the different methanococci are in a small range between 59,064 and 60,547 Da. Compa…
CUDASW++ 3.0: accelerating Smith-Waterman protein database search by coupling CPU and GPU SIMD instructions
2013
Background The maximal sensitivity for local alignments makes the Smith-Waterman algorithm a popular choice for protein sequence database search based on pairwise alignment. However, the algorithm is compute-intensive due to a quadratic time complexity. Corresponding runtimes are further compounded by the rapid growth of sequence databases. Results We present CUDASW++ 3.0, a fast Smith-Waterman protein database search algorithm, which couples CPU and GPU SIMD instructions and carries out concurrent CPU and GPU computations. For the CPU computation, this algorithm employs SSE-based vector execution units as accelerators. For the GPU computation, we have investigated for the first time a GPU …
HECTOR : a parallel multistage homopolymer spectrum based error corrector for 454 sequencing data
2014
Background Current-generation sequencing technologies are able to produce low-cost, high-throughput reads. However, the produced reads are imperfect and may contain various sequencing errors. Although many error correction methods have been developed in recent years, none explicitly targets homopolymer-length errors in the 454 sequencing reads. Results We present HECTOR, a parallel multistage homopolymer spectrum based error corrector for 454 sequencing data. In this algorithm, for the first time we have investigated a novel homopolymer spectrum based approach to handle homopolymer insertions or deletions, which are the dominant sequencing errors in 454 pyrosequencing reads. We have evaluat…
Cloning and functional analysis of cDNA encoding the hamster Bcl-2 protein.
2000
We have cloned cDNA encoding hamster Bcl-2 protein from total RNA of CHO-9 cells by RT-PCR using oligonucleotide primers sharing homology with the sequence of mouse and rat bcl-2. The fragments spanning the total coding region were cloned into pCR4-TOPO and sequenced for verification. The hamster bcl-2 cDNA has a size of 711 nucleotides and encodes a polypeptide of 236 amino acids. Hamster Bcl-2 shares 95.8 and 88.6% similarity with mouse and human Bcl-2, respectively. Northern blot analysis revealed a single 7.5 kb bcl-2 transcript in hamster (CHO-9), mouse (BK4), and rat (H5) cells and a 8.5 kb bcl-2 mRNA in human (HeLa MR) cells. The bcl-2 cDNA (771 bp) was recloned into pcDNA3 and the r…
A nuclear ribosomal DNA pseudogene in triatomines opens a new research field of fundamental and applied implications in Chagas disease
2015
A pseudogene, designated as "ps(5.8S+ITS-2)", paralogous to the 5.8S gene and internal transcribed spacer (ITS)-2 of the nuclear ribosomal DNA (rDNA), has been recently found in many triatomine species distributed throughout North America, Central America and northern South America. Among characteristics used as criteria for pseudogene verification, secondary structures and free energy are highlighted, showing a lower fit between minimum free energy, partition function and centroid structures, although in given cases the fit only appeared to be slightly lower. The unique characteristics of "ps(5.8S+ITS-2)" as a processed or retrotransposed pseudogenic unit of the ghost type are reviewed, wi…