Osmotic investigations

Sample

Hartmut Glossmann, Jörg Striessnig

The current volume provides detailed experimental protocols used to study plasma membrane ion channels as pharmacological targets. Coverage includes molecular and biochemical characterization of ion channels; fuctional analysis of ion channels after reconstitution, expression, or in cells; and specific methods and tools. This wealth of information will benefit academic and industrial researchers and graduate students in pharmacology, biochemistry, physiology, and biophysics.

Sample

Ingolf Bernhardt, J. Clive Ellory

This book describes our current understanding of the transport of ions, amino acids, nucleosides, sugars, water and gases across the red blood cell membrane. It also outlines the necessary theoretical background to understand the dynamics of membrane constituents together with the mechanisms of transport pathways (pumps, channels, carriers/cotransporters, residual passive permeability). Separate chapters describe our present ideas about membrane and metabolic disorders as well as red blood cell diseases like malaria, sickle cell disease, and hypertension. The latest findings are explained on the basis of a historical review and well-established principles. The book and its chapters are thus structured in a manner that makes the material accessible to beginners in the field of red blood cell physiology and biophysics. Active researchers will also benefit from this carefully organized compilation.

Sample

Jürgen-Hinrich Fuhrkop and Jürgen Köning

Membranes and Molecular Assemblies: The Synkinetic Approach contains 118 colour illustrations and a further 70 in black and white. Great care has been taken to choose graphics that illustrate difficult concepts. The book describes the wealth of membrane structures realized by chemists mainly within the last two decadesmicelles, vesicles, fibres, and surface monolayers - from the point of view of supramolecular chemistry. It puts new emphasis on "synkinetic" procedures for the preparation of non-covalent assemblies as well as their structural characterization by electron microscopy, solid state NMR spectroscopy, and comparison to X-ray crystal structures. The supramolecular structure of well-defined molecular assemblies and their use as complex reaction systems is also emphasized. Stereoselective surface recognition, asymmetric membranes, vectorial photoreactions, solid molecular bilayers in the form of tubules or helical rods, and sealable nanopores in membranes or on electrode surfaces are a few outstanding examples. In addition, the importance of well-defined gaps on surfaces and within membranes and crystals is discussed in context for the first time. Membranes and Molecular Assemblies will provide a fascinating read for graduates, researchers, and teachers in bio-organic chemistry, with interests in membranes and surface and colloid structure.

Sample

P. Grigolini

The subject of this book emerged from a series of lectures that the author gave at the Department of Physics of the University of North Texas during the 1992 Spring Semester, and reflects the vivacious discussions that he has been having with the students and the co-workers attending this course. The main conclusion of these discussions was that the major tenet of the "conservative" physicists, that classical physics must be recovered from quantum mechanics by adopting the statistical perspective of Gibbs, implying by necessity a Gibbs ensemble of Universes as well as a Gibbs ensemble of observers, is not satisfactory. It is actually as unsatisfactory as the dominant approaches to irreversibility. The book examines the current approaches to irreversibility, in classical and quantum physics, and shows that an objective theory of irreversibility does not exist yet, and that all the current theories of irreversibility share with quantum mechanics elements of subjectivity, making crucial the role played by the observer. In addition to the traditional quantum mechanical paradoxes, concerning the quantum theory of measurement, the book also discusses the new difficulties that the physics of chaos is causing to the widely accepted correspondence principle, and suggests that the Boltzmann dream, the dream that the fracture between dynamics and thermodynamics might be healed, cannot become true within the framework of the current physics, and that the establishment of a new physics is necessary for that ambitious purpose to be achieved.