Absorption spectra of irradiated films of polyvinyl chloride coated with perylene.
The visible and UV spectra γ-irradiated films of polyvinyl chloride doped or coated with perylene were recorded. These films were irradiated either under a vacuum, in N2 O or in NH3. In the case of...
Chemical dosimetry with trans-stilbene-doped polystyrene film.
Polystyrene film doped with trans-stilbene has been found useful as a chemical dosimeter for ionizing radiation. It is insensitive to photon energy changes and dose rate over the photon energy range from 4.7 MeV to 1.25 keV (mean) and for rates from 300 rads/sec to $0.75\times 10^{14}\ {\rm rads}/{\rm sec}$ . The mechanism for the dosimetry reaction, isomerization of trans- to cis-stilbene, is analogous to the mechanism proposed for radiolytic isomerization for fluid solution in benzene and toluene. The useful range of these films is from 2× 105 to 108 rads.
New method for analysis of enzymatic reactions: Thermolysin-catalyzed synthesis of aspartame precursor
Aspartame is an artificial sweetener which is 200 times sweeter than sucrose. A precursor of aspartame, N-(benzyloxycarbonyl)-l-aspartyl-l-phenylalanine methyl ester (Z-APM) was synthesized and hydrolyzed with thermolysin in an aqueous monophasic system. Graphical plotting methods and/or nonlinear regression have been used to analyze enzymatic reactions because of the nonlinearity of enzymatic rate equations. There are, however, problems: the former require accurate measurement of the initial reaction rate and the latter gives no analytical information. The authors proposed a method to solve the nonlinear enzymatic rate equations with respect to the concentration of a product with the Taylor expansion, especially for the reversible Theorell-Chance mechanism (Murakami, Y., Hirata, M., and Hirata, A., J. Ferment. Bioeng., 82, 246–252, 1996). This solution, however, is complex for practical use. In this paper, a simpler solution to explain the thermolysin-catalyzed synthesis of Z-APM is obtained. New methods to determine the kinetic parameters, especially for the reversible Theorell-Chance mechanism, based on the approximated solution are proposed. The results calculated using the obtained kinetic parameters can satisfactorily explain the experimental results, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed analysis. We must know the relation between the concentrations of substrates and a product, and accurately evaluate of the result obtained using Taylor expansion when we determine the kinetic parameters using our newly developed methods. The methods to determine the kinetic parameters of the reversible Theorell-Chance mechanism described in this paper is, however, expected to be applied to general enzymatic reactions.