The ability to simultaneously monitor both the ionic current and fluorescence from membrane channels and pores has the potential to link structural changes with function in such proteins. We present a new method for simultaneously measuring single-channel electrical currents and fluorescence from membrane proteins by using water-in-oil droplet bilayers. We demonstrate the simultaneous fluorescence and electrical detection of stochastic blocking by cyclodextrin in multiple staphylococcal alpha-hemolysin pores. The combined fluorescence signal from individual pores exhibits the same sequence of blocking events as the total current recording, showing that the two signals from each pore are correlated.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja808128s | DOI Listing |
Soft Matter
January 2025
Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204, USA.
Microrheology has become an indispensable tool for measuring the dynamics of macromolecular systems. Yet, its ability to characterize polymer dynamics across spatiotemporal scales, which vary among polymers and concentration regimes, is limited by the selection of probe morphologies and sizes. Here, we introduce semiflexible M13 phage as a powerful microrheological probe able to circumvent these constraints to robustly capture the dynamics of polymeric solutions across decades of concentrations, sizes, and ionic conditions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEES Catal
December 2024
Department of Chemical Engineering, Delft University of Technology 2629 HZ Delft The Netherlands
Electrochemical CO reduction offers a promising method of converting renewable electrical energy into valuable hydrocarbon compounds vital to hard-to-abate sectors. Significant progress has been made on the lab scale, but scale-up demonstrations remain limited. Because of the low energy efficiency of CO reduction, we suspect that significant thermal gradients may develop in industrially relevant dimensions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeerJ
January 2025
Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan.
The continuous contamination of heavy metals (HMs) in our ecosystem due to industrialization, urbanization and other anthropogenic activities has become a serious environmental constraint to successful crop production. Lead (Pb) toxicity causes ionic, oxidative and osmotic injuries which induce various morphological, physiological, metabolic and molecular abnormalities in plants. Polyethylene glycol (PEG) is widely used to elucidate drought stress induction and alleviation mechanisms in treated plants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnal Chim Acta
February 2025
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, 488 Escondido Mall, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA. Electronic address:
Background: Isotachophoresis (ITP) is a well-established electrokinetic method for separation and preconcentration of analytes. Several simulation tools for ITP have been published, but their use for experimental design is limited by the computational time for a single run and/or by the number of conditions that can be investigated per simulation run. A large fraction of the existing solvers also do not account for ionic strength effects, which can influence whether an analyte focuses in ITP.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Biol Chem
January 2025
School of Biological Sciences, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA; Department of Psychiatry, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA; George E. Whalen Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.
Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) are pentameric ligand-gated ion channels. In mammals, there are 16 individual nAChR subunits allowing for numerous possible heteromeric compositions. nAChRs assembled from α7 or α9 subunits will form as homopentamers.
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