Magnetic Resonance Detection of CD34+ Cells from Umbilical Cord Blood Using a 19F Label.

Impaired homing and delayed recovery upon hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) with hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) derived from umbilical cord blood (UCB) is a major problem. Tracking transplanted cells in vivo will be helpful to detect impaired homing at an early stage and allows early interventions to improve engraftment and outcome after transplantation. In this study, we show sufficient intracellular labeling of UCB-derived CD34+ cells, with 19F-containing PLGA nanoparticles which were detectable with both flow cytometry and magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS).

Nucleic acid helix structure determination from NMR proton chemical shifts.

We present a method for de novo derivation of the three-dimensional helix structure of nucleic acids using non-exchangeable proton chemical shifts as sole source of experimental restraints. The method is called chemical shift de novo structure derivation protocol employing singular value decomposition (CHEOPS) and uses iterative singular value decomposition to optimize the structure in helix parameter space. The correct performance of CHEOPS and its range of application are established via an extensive set of structure derivations using either simulated or experimental chemical shifts as input.

Determination of size and sign of hetero-nuclear coupling constants from 2D 19F-13C correlation spectra.

Fluorinated organic compounds have become increasingly important within the polymer and the pharmaceutical industry as well as for clinical applications. For the structural elucidation of such compounds, NMR experiments with fluorine detection are of great value due to the favorable NMR properties of the fluorine nucleus. For the investigation of three fluorinated compounds, triple resonance 2D HSQC and HMBC experiments were adopted to fluorine detection with carbon and/or proton decoupling to yield F-C, F-C{H}, F-C{C(acq)} and F-C{H,C(acq)} variants.

The unstable part of the apical stem of duck hepatitis B virus epsilon shows enhanced base pair opening but not pico- to nanosecond dynamics and is essential for reverse transcriptase binding.

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) replication starts with binding of reverse transcriptase (RT) to the apical stem-loop region of epsilon, a conserved element of the RNA pregenome. For duck HBV, an in vitro replication system has provided molecular details of this interaction. Further insights can be obtained from the structure and dynamics of the duck and human apical stem-loops.