Non-covalent forces

The future prospects for the capsule project emerge from these considerations. Further increasing the size of the capsule and building chemical functionalities into the inner cavity would allow a closer emulation the functions of enzymes, especially those that require cofactors in order to catalyze chemical transformations. Another important aspect is to design capsules that can combine stereospecificity and catalysis - that is accelerate stereoselective transformations. Capsules that reversibly dimerize in water would probably contribute a lot more to our understanding of non-covalent forces and solvent effects in this most biorelevant medium. So far, water solubility and assembly have not been achieved with hydrogen-bonded capsules. 

The first choice of enzyme to add to a detergent is practically always a protease. The proteases in modem detergents are subtilisins which are microbial enzymes from Bacillus. The subtilisins consist of approximately 270 amino acids and are heart-shaped molecules with a binding cleft and a binding pocket to which substrates such as protein stains can be bound by non-covalent forces. 

An introduction to the non-covalent forces operating in stable ionic and molecular aggregates will be presented in Section 2. A brief description of the experimental methodologies employed in the production, detection, and characterization of clusters will be given in Section 3. The available experimental evidence on the structure of chiral clusters and their intrinsic stability, reactivity, and evolution dynamics will be presented and discussed in Sections 4 (molecular clusters) and 5 (ionic clusters). In the same sections, the experimental data will be interpreted in the light of the available theoretical evidence. Finally, some concluding remarks will be expressed in Section 6. 

Physical or electrochemical adsorption uses non-covalent forces to affix the nucleic acid to the solid support and represents a relatively simple mechanism for attachment that is easy to automate. Adsorption was favoured and described in some chapters as suitable immobilization technique when multisite attachment of DNA is needed to exploit the intrinsic DNA oxidation signal in hybridization reactions. Dendrimers such as polyamidoamine with a high density of terminal amino groups have been reported to increase the surface coverage of physically adsorbed DNA to the surface. Furthermore, electrochemical adsorption is described as a useful immobihzation strategy for electrochemical genosensor fabrication. 

The covalent attachment of arabinose and galactose to the hydroxy-L-proline-rich protein of primary cell-walls is now generally accepted,228230 but the evidence available suggests that the glycoprotein is not covalently attached to any of the other cell-wall polymers, This, of course, does not preclude the possibility of the existence of strong, non-covalent forces binding protein to wall polysaccharides.228,230... 

Table 3. Major Non-Covalent Forces and Interactions Important in the Organization and Stabilization of Protein Structure in Aqueous Solutions 8 16-,7)... 

Guilera, G., Steed, J. W., Topological control in coordination polymers by non-covalent forces. Chem. Commun. 1999, 1563-1564. 

This chapter deals with formation of cyclic 2D and 3D structures in solution by self-assembly of two or more components using hydrogen bonds as the major interactions. Obviously, the formation of a defined supramolecular aggregate stabilized by non-covalent forces is a thermodynamically driven process which reflects a balance between enthalpy and entropy. Consequently, the product of a non-covalent macrocyclic synthesis must be evaluated and predicted in terms of thermodynamic minima in an equilibrium mixture. 

---