Critical fluctuations in DOPC/DPPC-d62/cholesterol mixtures: 2H magnetic resonance and relaxation.

Static and magic angle spinning (MAS) (2)H nuclear magnetic resonance experiments have been performed on a series of multilamellar dispersions of di-oleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine/di-palmitoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine-d62/cholesterol in water to investigate the compositional fluctuations which occur in the region of the line of critical points for this ternary system. The strong dependence of the MAS line widths on temperature, sample composition, and spinning rate provides a direct measure of the magnitude of the fluctuations in the (2)H quadrupolar Hamiltonian. These data are analyzed in terms of models for critical fluctuations in composition leading to a value for the critical index for the correlation length, ν(c) = 0.

Phosphorylation controls the interaction of the connexin43 C-terminal domain with tubulin and microtubules.

Connexins are structurally related transmembrane proteins that assemble to form gap junction channels involved in the mediation of intercellular communication. It has been shown that the intracellular tail of connexin43 (Cx43) interacts with tubulin and microtubules with putative impacts on its own intracellular trafficking, its activity in channel communication, and its interference with specific growth factor signal transduction cascades. We demonstrate here that the microtubule binding of Cx43 is mainly driven by a short region of 26 amino acid residues located within the intracellular tail of Cx43.

Phase equilibria in DOPC/DPPC: Conversion from gel to subgel in two component mixtures.

Biological membranes contain a mixture of phospholipids with varying degrees of hydrocarbon chain unsaturation. Mixtures of long chain saturated and unsaturated lipids with cholesterol have attracted a lot of attention because of the formation of two coexisting fluid bilayer phases in such systems over a broad range of temperature and composition. Interpretation of the phase behavior of such ternary mixtures must be based on a thorough understanding of the phase behavior of the binary mixtures formed with the same components.

Empirical determination of the absolute configuration of small chiral molecules using natural abundance 2H NMR in chiral liquid crystals.

Natural abundance deuterium 2D NMR spectroscopy in polypeptide liquid crystals is used for empirically determining the absolute configuration of small chiral molecules.

Simplification of the 1H NMR spectra of enantiomers dissolved in chiral liquid crystals, combining variable angle sample spinning and selective refocusing experiments.

This work presents a technique to simplify overcrowded proton spectra in chiral liquid crystal solvents using rotation of the sample near the magic angle, VASS, combined with homonuclear selective refocusing 2D NMR experiments, SERF. This methodology provides a powerful tool to visualise enantiomers out of unresolved proton spectra. A modified SERF sequence is presented where the resulting 2D spectrum can be phased to increase the resolution.