Orienting anisotropic nanostructures at interfaces during bottom-up device fabrication is a significant challenge. However, biology routinely orients complex nanostructures at cell surfaces, in part based on collective interactions with flexible phospholipid headgroups having large dipoles. We show that phospholipid striped phases, which expose polar heads and nonpolar tails in alternating stripes with pitches of 7 nm, order and orient gold nanowires with diameters < 2 nm and lengths of 1 mm. Assembly of the wires from nonpolar solvent is correlated with the presence of nanometer-wide water channels surrounding the phospholipid headgroups, suggesting that the minimal polar environments are important in regulating processes in the nonpolar surroundings.
A digital
filter based on non-negative matrix factorization (NMF)
enables blind deconvolution of temporal information from large data
sets, simultaneously recovering both photon arrival times and the
instrument impulse response function (IRF). In general, the measured
digital signals produced by modern analytical instrumentation are
convolved by the corresponding IRFs, which can complicate quantitative
analyses. Common examples include photon counting (PC), chromatography,
super resolution imaging, fluorescence imaging, and mass spectrometry.
Scintillation counting, in particular, provides a signal-to-noise
advantage in measurements of low intensity signals, but has a limited
dynamic range due to pulse overlap. This limitation can complicate
the interpretation of data by masking temporal and amplitude information
on the underlying detected signal. Typical methods for deconvolution
of the photon events require advanced knowledge of the IRF, which
is not generally trivial to obtain. In this work, a sliding window
approach was developed to perform NMF one pixel at a time on short
segments of large (e.g., 25 million point) data sets. Using random
initial guesses for the IRF, the NMF filter simultaneously recovered
both the deconvolved photon arrival times and the IRF. Applying the
NMF filter to the analysis of triboluminescence (TL) data traces of
active pharmaceutical ingredients enabled discrimination between different
hypothesized physical origins of the signal.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.