A lipid membrane is a main component of biological membranes. Contemporary bionanotechnologies use phospholipids and ceramides as basic components of drugs and cosmetic preparations. Phospholipids-based nanoparticles are used as drug carriers. Effective development of bionanotechnologies in Russia calls for creation of physical methods to diagnose the particle nanostructure which would be promising for application in pharmacology. Radiation with wavelengths of 1–10 Å is an adequate instrument for detecting the nanostructure of lipid bi- and monolayers. The review deals with methods that apply neutron scattering and synchrotron radiation for studying nanostructures of lipid membranes, phospholipid nanoparticles, and phospholipid monolayers on a water surface by techniques of diffraction, small-angle scattering, and reflectometry. The importance of the mutually complementary application of neutron and synchrotron radiation for solving urgent problems of membrane biophysics, microbiology, dermapharmacology, and bionanotechnologies is demonstrated by particular examples of studies of phospholipid membranes and ceramide-based membranes. The efficiency of development and application of new methods for solving urgent problems of biophysics is shown. The review is written on the basis of results obtained over the period of 1999–2010 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) Laboratory of Neutron Physics in collaboration with the Pharmaceutical Departments of universities of France (Paris-Sud, Chatenay Malabry) and Germany (Martin Luther University, Halle). The experiments were performed at various European and Russian neutron and synchrotron sources.
Protein-lipid films based on the enzyme alkaline phosphatase were subjected to the action of chelating drugs, which are used for accelerating the removal of heavy metals from the human body, and the elemental composition of the resulting films was investigated. Total-reflection X-ray fluorescence...
Until recently, protein crystallization has mostly been regarded as a stochastic event over which the investigator has little or no control. With the dramatic technological advances in synchrotron-radiation sources and detectors and the equally impressive progress in crystallographic software, in...
submitted by BoneActivating 1 year and 10 months ago
There is great interest in the generation of energy-tunable, bright, short-pulse X/I3-ray sources, which are required in various research fields. Laser-Compton scattering (LCS) is considered to be one of the most promising methods to implement this kind of X/I3-ray source. At the 100-MeV LINAC of...
Nuclear ground state properties including mass, charge radii, spins and moments can be determined by applying atomic physics techniques such as Penning-trap based mass spectrometry and laser spectroscopy. The MATS and LaSpec setups at the low-energy beamline at FAIR will allow us to extend the kn...
General problems of the complementarity of different physical methods and specific features of the interaction between neutron and matter and neutron diffraction with respect to the time of flight are discussed. The results of studying the kinetics of structural changes in lipid membranes under h...
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Laboratory is currently exploring needs and protocols for the storage of evidentiary items contaminated with radioactive material. While a large body of knowledge on the behavior of storage polymers in radiation fields exists, this knowledge has not been ...
Characterization with neutrons and synchrotron radiation has yielded essential contributions to the research and development of automotive and aerospace materials, processing methods, and components. This review mainly emphasises developments related to commercial passenger airplanes and light-du...
The level of cell transfection mediated by lipoplexes formed using the ferrocenyl lipid bis(11-ferrocenylundecyl)dimethylammonium bromide (BFDMA) depends strongly on the oxidation state of the two ferrocenyl groups of the lipid (reduced BFDMA generally mediates high levels of transfection, but ox...
Application of chemiluminescence (CL) for study of free-radical reactions in human and animal cells and tissues is considered in this review. Historically, the study of intrinsic (ultraweak) luminescence gave place to the measurement of CL in the presence of chemical activators (CL probes) and ph...
We consider the problem of the slowing down of neutrons in an infinite homogeneous medium with strong resonance absorption and uniformly distributed neutron sources.The solution of the adjoint equation gives the probability that a neutron of energy E escapes resonance capture during the process o...
