Stable reference environment

According to Nyholm and Tobe (i) The definition of a usual oxidation state refers to oxidation states that are stable in environments made up of those chemical species that were common in classical inorganic compounds, e.g. oxides, water and other simple... 

The identification of the structures responsible for D1 and D2 and their stabilities toward hydrolysis are further supported by investigations of the hydrolysis behavior of the corresponding isolated ring molecules, octamethylcyclotetrasiloxane (OMCT) and hexamethylcyclotrisiloxane (HMCT) (51.). OMCT is stable in aqueous environments, whereas HMCT hydrolyzes with a pseudo-first order rate constant 3.8 ( 0.4) x 10 3 min 1 (tt, 2 — 3.0 hours). This latter value is comparable to the rate constant for D2 hydrolysis, 5.2 ( 0.5) x 10 3 min"1 (t1/2 - 2.2 hours) and is 75x greater than the rate constant describing hydrolysis of unstrained, conventional a-Si02 (as estimated by extrapolation of the data in reference (52.). 

Polypeptide chains exist in an equilibrium between different conformations as a function of environment (solvent, other solutes, pH) and thermodynamic (temperature, pressure) conditions. If a polypeptide adopts a structurally ordered, stable conformation, one speaks of an equilibrium between a folded state, represented by the structured, densely populated conformer, and an unfolded state, represented by diverse, sparsely populated conformers. Although this equilibrium exists for polypeptide chains of any size, its thermodynamics and kinetics are typically different for oligopeptides and proteins. This can be broadly explained with reference to the different dimensionalities of the free-energy hypersurfaces of these two types of molecules. 

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