Path-Integral Formulation of Casimir Effects in Supersymmetric Quantum Electrodynamics

The Casimir effect is an interesting phenomenon in the sense that it provides us with one of the primitive means of extracting the energy out of the vacuum. Since the original work of Casimir a number of works have appeared in extending the result to the case of more general topological and dynamical configurations of the boundary condition and to the circumstances at finite temperature and gravity. In the studies of the Casimir effects it is common to assume the free electromagnetic field in the bounded region. It may be interesting to extend our arguments for fields other than the electromagnetic field. The Casimir effect due to the free fermionic fields has been investigated by several authors and has been found to result in an attractive force under the suitable physical boundary conditions.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, REVTe

Supersaturation-limited amyloid fibrillation of insulin revealed by ultrasonication.

Amyloid fibrils form in supersaturated solutions via a nucleation and growth mechanism. We proposed that ultrasonication may be an effective agitation to trigger nucleation that would otherwise not occur under the persistent metastability of supersaturation. However, the roles of supersaturation and effects of ultrasonication have not been elucidated in detail except for limited cases. Insulin is an amyloidogenic protein that is useful for investigating the mechanisms underlying amyloid fibrillation with biological relevance. We studied the alcohol-induced amyloid fibrillation of insulin using various concentrations of 2,2,2-trifluoroethanol (TFE), and 1,1,1,3,3,3-hexafluoro-2-propanol (HFIP) at pH 2.0 and 4.8. Ultrasonic irradiation effectively triggered fibrillation under conditions in which insulin retained persistent supersaturation. Structural analyses by circular dichroism (CD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) revealed that the dominant structures of fibrils varied between parallel and antiparallel beta-sheets depending on the solvent conditions. pH- and alcohol-concentration-dependent phase diagrams showed a marked difference before and after the ultrasonic treatment, which indicated that the persistent metastability of supersaturation determined the conformations of insulin. These results indicate the importance of an alternative view of amyloid fibrils as supersaturation-limited crystal-like aggregates formed above the solubility limit