Search results for "10120 Department of Chemistry"
showing 10 items of 18 documents
NMR Investigation of Structures of G-Protein Coupled Receptor Folding Intermediates
2016
Folding of G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) according to the two-stage model (Popot, J. L., and Engelman, D. M. (1990) Biochemistry 29, 4031-4037) is postulated to proceed in 2 steps: partitioning of the polypeptide into the membrane followed by diffusion until native contacts are formed. Herein we investigate conformational preferences of fragments of the yeast Ste2p receptor using NMR. Constructs comprising the first, the first two, and the first three transmembrane (TM) segments, as well as a construct comprising TM1-TM2 covalently linked to TM7 were examined. We observed that the isolated TM1 does not form a stable helix nor does it integrate well into the micelle. TM1 is significant…
Eawag-Soil in enviPath: a new resource for exploring regulatory pesticide soil biodegradation pathways and half-life data.
2017
Developing models for the prediction of microbial biotransformation pathways and half-lives of trace organic contaminants in different environments requires as training data easily accessible and sufficiently large collections of respective biotransformation data that are annotated with metadata on study conditions. Here, we present the Eawag-Soil package, a public database that has been developed to contain all freely accessible regulatory data on pesticide degradation in laboratory soil simulation studies for pesticides registered in the EU (282 degradation pathways, 1535 reactions, 1619 compounds and 4716 biotransformation half-life values with corresponding metadata on study conditions)…
Can copper(II) mediate Hoogsteen base-pairing in a left-handed DNA duplex? A pulse EPR study
2010
Pulse EPR spectroscopy is sued to investigate possible structural features of the copper(II) ion coordinated to poly(dG-dC) poly(dG-dC) in a frozen aqueous solution, and the structural change of the polynucleotide induced by the presence of the metal ion. Two different copper species were identified and their geometry explained by a molecular model. According to this model, one species is exclusively coordinated to a single guanine with the N7 nitrogen atom forming a coordinative bond with the copper. In the other species, a guanine and a cytosine form a ternary complex together with the copper ion. A copper crosslink between the N7 of guanine and N3 of cytosine is proposed as the most prob…
Structural analysis of Cu(II) ligation to the 5'-GMP nucleotide by pulse EPR spectroscopy.
2007
JBIC Journal of Biological Inorganic Chemistry, 12 (6)
Nucleophilic additions of sodium alkoxides to 4,4-dichloro-1,1-diphenyl- 2-azabuta-1,3-diene
2000
The reaction of some sodium alkoxides with 4,4-dichloro-1,1-diphenyl-2-azabuta-1,3-diene is described. Whereas sodium methoxide, ethoxide or isopropoxide leads to 1,3-bis(alkoxy)- and/or 1,3,4-tris(alkoxy)-2-azabut-2-enes, the sodium salt of ethyl glycolate gives a Δ2-oxazoline. Mechanisms for the formation of these products are proposed.
Syntheses and properties of tetrathio- and tetraseleno metalates [(C5Me4R)2NbE2]2M (E=S, Se; M=Cr, Mo; R=Me, Et) with peripheric niobocene ligands
1998
Abstract Reactions of Cp*2Nb(η2-S2)H 1 (Cp*=C5Me5 (a), C5Me4Et (b)) and Cp*2Nb(η2-Se2H) 3 with 0.5 equivalents of M(CO)6 (M=Cr, Mo) in boiling toluene give the CO free complexes [Cp*2NbE2]2M 4–7. X-ray diffraction analyses have been carried out for the Mo complexes 5a (E=S) and 7a (E=Se) showing that the structures contain ME4 tetrahedral cores with two attached niobocene ligands thus forming a nearly linear trimetallic unit. Absorption spectra and electrochemical studies of complexes 4–7 are described. Characteristic of the novel CrSe4 chromophor are four reversible one electron redox steps. Chemical oxidation of 4a and 5a with [(C5H5)2Fe]PF6 gives the salts {[Cp*2NbS2]2M}PF6 (M=Cr, Mo) 10…
Force Field for Water over Pt(111): Development, Assessment, and Comparison
2018
Metal/water interfaces are key in many natural and industrial processes, such as corrosion, atmospheric, or environmental chemistry. Even today, the only practical approach to simulate large interfaces between a metal and water is to perform force-field simulations. In this work, we propose a novel force field, GAL17, to describe the interaction of water and a Pt(111) surface. GAL17 builds on three terms: (i) a standard Lennard-Jones potential for the bonding interaction between the surface and water, (ii) a Gaussian term to improve the surface corrugation, and (iii) two terms describing the angular dependence of the interaction energy. The 12 parameters of this force field are fitted again…
Interaction of Novel Metal Complexes with DNA: Synthetic and Structural Aspects
2009
Metal ions bind to nucleic acids at various positions. This binding can be modulated by using metal complexes with appropriate ligands. Novel mono- and especially dinuclear metal complexes could be a powerful tool to detect rare, but still physiologically relevant, forms of DNA, e.g. the left-handed Z-DNA. In this review, our recent research activities in this area of bioinorganic chemistry are summarized. A special emphasis is laid on the synthetic challenges that arose upon the synthesis of the polyamine ligands. Further, some rather unusual approaches to elucidate the solution structure of copper bound to guanosine monophosphate with the help of pulsed EPR techniques like ENDOR and HYSC…
Angular Trapping of Anisometric Nano-Objects in a Fluid
2012
We demonstrate the ability to trap, levitate, and orient single anisometric nanoscale objects with high angular precision in a fluid. An electrostatic fluidic trap confines a spherical object at a spatial location defined by the minimum of the electrostatic system free energy. For an anisometric object and a potential well lacking angular symmetry, the system free energy can further strongly depend on the object's orientation in the trap. Engineering the morphology of the trap thus enables precise spatial and angular confinement of a single levitating nano-object, and the process can be massively parallelized. Since the physics of the trap depends strongly on the surface charge of the objec…
Efficient Linear-Scaling Density Functional Theory for Molecular Systems
2013
Despite recent progress in linear scaling (LS) density function theory (DFT), the computational cost of the existing LS methods remains too high for a widespread adoption at present. In this work, we exploit nonorthogonal localized molecular orbitals to develop a series of LS methods for molecular systems with a low computational overhead. High efficiency of the proposed methods is achieved with a new robust two-stage variational procedure or by replacing the optimization altogether with an accurate nonself-consistent approach. We demonstrate that, even for challenging condensed-phase systems, the implemented LS methods are capable of extending the range of accurate DFT simulations to molec…