Phytoestrogen coumestrol: Antioxidant capacity and its loading in albumin nanoparticles.

Coumestrol is a polyphenol with promising therapeutic applications as phytoestrogen, antioxidant and potential cancer chemoprevention agent. The presence of two hydroxyl groups on its chemical structure, with orientation analogous to estradiol, is responsible of both, its antioxidant capacity and its estrogenic activity. However, several studies show that the interaction of polyphenols with food and plasma proteins reduces their antioxidant efficacy.

Radical Ions of 3-Styryl-quinoxalin-2-one Derivatives Studied by Pulse Radiolysis in Organic Solvents.

The absorption-spectral and kinetic behaviors of radical ions and neutral hydrogenated radicals of seven 3-styryl-quinoxalin-2(1 H)-one (3-SQ) derivatives, one without substituents in the styryl moiety, four others with electron-donating (R = -CH, -OCH, and -N(CH)) or electron-withdrawing (R = -OCF) substituents in the para position in their benzene ring, and remaining two with double methoxy substituents (-OCH), however, at different positions (meta/para and ortho/meta) have been studied by UV-vis spectrophotometric pulse radiolysis in neat acetonitrile saturated with argon (Ar) and oxygen (O) and in 2-propanol saturated with Ar, at room temperature. In acetonitrile solutions, the radical anions (4R-SQ) are characterized by two absorption maxima located at λ = 470-490 nm and λ = 510-540 nm, with the respective molar absorption coefficients ε = 8500-13 100 M cm and ε = 6100-10 300 M cm, depending on the substituent (R). All 4R-SQ decay in acetonitrile via first-order kinetics, with the rate constants in the range (1.

Flavonoids in Microheterogeneous Media, Relationship between Their Relative Location and Their Reactivity towards Singlet Oxygen.

In this work, the relationship between the molecular structure of three flavonoids (kaempferol, quercetin and morin), their relative location in microheterogeneous media (liposomes and erythrocyte membranes) and their reactivity against singlet oxygen was studied. The changes observed in membrane fluidity induced by the presence of these flavonoids and the influence of their lipophilicity/hydrophilicity on the antioxidant activity in lipid membranes were evaluated by means of fluorescent probes such as Laurdan and diphenylhexatriene (DPH). The small differences observed for the value of generalized polarization of Laurdan (GP) curves in function of the concentration of flavonoids, indicate that these three compounds promote similar alterations in liposomes and erythrocyte membranes.

On readout of vibrational qubits using quantum beats.

Readout of the final states of qubits is a crucial step towards implementing quantum computation in experiment. Although not scalable to large numbers of qubits per molecule, computational studies show that molecular vibrations could provide a significant (factor 2-5 in the literature) increase in the number of qubits compared to two-level systems. In this theoretical work, we explore the process of readout from vibrational qubits in thiophosgene molecule, SCCl2, using quantum beat oscillations.

More protected vibrational states at the dissociation limit of SCCl2.

Local vibrational coupling models predict that intramolecular vibrational energy redistribution (IVR) is not completely statistical even at the dissociation limit of polyatomic molecules. Thus states protected from IVR and from rapid dissociation form regular progressions and can be assigned vibrational quantum numbers. We previously observed such regular progressions of states in vibrational spectra of the molecule SCCl2, but a discrepancy in the density of such states remained between theory and experiment.

Franck-Condon fingerprinting of vibration-tunneling spectra.

We introduce Franck-Condon fingerprinting as a method for assigning complex vibration-tunneling spectra. The B̃ state of thiophosgene (SCCl2) serves as our prototype. Despite several attempts, assignment of its excitation spectrum has proved difficult because of near-degenerate vibrational frequencies, Fermi resonance between the C-Cl stretching mode and the Cl-C-Cl bending mode, and large tunneling splittings due to the out-of-plane umbrella mode.

High fidelity quantum gates with vibrational qubits.

Physical implementation of quantum gates acting on qubits does not achieve a perfect fidelity of 1. The actual output qubit may not match the targeted output of the desired gate. According to theoretical estimates, intrinsic gate fidelities >99.