Publications by authors named "Yousef Akhlaghi"

Octreotide as a synthetic cyclic octapeptide is a somatostatin analog with longer half-life and more selectivity for inhibition of the growth hormone. The acetate salt of octreotide is currently used for medical treatment of somatostatin-related disorders such as endocrine and carcinoid tumors, acromegaly, and gigantism. Octreotide contains both cysteine and tryptophan residues which make the hydrolysis part of its amino acid analysis procedure very challenging.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Accurate thermometry at micro- and nanoscales is essential in many nanobiotechnological applications. The nanothermometers introduced in this paper are composed of labeled molecular beacons (MBs) comprising gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) on which, depending on application, many MBs of one or more types are immobilized. In this design, three differently labeled MBs with different thermostabilities function as the sensing elements, and AuNPs act as carriers of the MBs and also quenchers of their fluorophores.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The single stranded DNA can be adsorbed on the negatively charged surface of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs), but the rigid structure of double stranded DNA prevents it from adsorption. Signal of a tagged single stranded DNA will be quenched by the plasmon effect of the AuNP surface after its adsorption. This phenomenon has been used to study the DNA hybridization and interactions of two complementary 21mer oligonucleotides each tagged with a different fluorescent dye in the presence of 13 nm gold nanoparticles.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In Tucker3 analysis of three-way data array obtained from a chemical or biological system, it is sometimes possible to use a priori knowledge about the system to specify what is called a restricted Tucker3 model. Often, the restricted Tucker3 model is characterized by having some elements of the core forced to zero. As a simple example, an F-component PARAFAC model can be seen as a restricted (F, F, F) Tucker3 model in which only superdiagonal elements of the core are allowed to be nonzero.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF