Biomembranes from slaughterhouse blood erythrocytes as prolonged release systems for dexamethasone sodium phosphate.

The present study investigated preparation of bovine and porcine erythrocyte membranes from slaughterhouse blood as bio-derived materials for delivery of dexamethasone-sodium phosphate (DexP). The obtained biomembranes, i.e., ghosts were characterized in vitro in terms of morphological properties, loading parameters, and release behavior. For the last two, an UHPLC/-HESI-MS/MS based analytical procedure for absolute drug identification and quantification was developed. The results revealed that loading of DexP into both type of ghosts was directly proportional to the increase of drug concentration in the incubation medium, while incubation at 37°C had statistically significant effect on loaded amount of DexP (P < 0.05). The encapsulation efficiency was about fivefold higher in porcine compared to bovine ghosts. Insight into ghosts' surface morphology by field emission-scanning electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy confirmed that besides inevitable effects of osmosis, DexP inclusion itself had no observable additional effect on the morphology of the ghosts carriers. DexP release profiles were dependent on erythrocyte ghost type and amount of residual hemoglobin. However, sustained DexP release was achieved and shown over 3 days from porcine ghosts and 5 days from bovine erythrocyte ghosts. © 2016 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Biotechnol. Prog., 32:1046-1055, 2016.

Finite-size scaling in asymmetric systems of percolating sticks.

We investigate finite-size scaling in percolating widthless stick systems with variable aspect ratios in an extensive Monte Carlo simulation study. A generalized scaling function is introduced to describe the scaling behavior of the percolation distribution moments and probability at the percolation threshold. We show that the prefactors in the generalized scaling function depend on the system aspect ratio and exhibit features that are generic to the whole class of the percolating systems. In particular, we demonstrate the existence of a characteristic aspect ratio for which percolation probability at the threshold is scale invariant and definite parity of the prefactors in the generalized scaling function for the first two percolation probability moments.

Properties of quantum systems via diagonalization of transition amplitudes. I. Discretization effects.

We analyze the method for calculation of properties of nonrelativistic quantum systems based on exact diagonalization of space-discretized short-time evolution operators. In this paper we present a detailed analysis of the errors associated with space discretization. Approaches using direct diagonalization of real-space discretized Hamiltonians lead to polynomial errors in discretization spacing Delta . Here we show that the method based on the diagonalization of the short-time evolution operators leads to substantially smaller discretization errors, vanishing exponentially with 1/Delta(2). As a result, the presented calculation scheme is particularly well suited for numerical studies of few-body quantum systems. The analytically derived discretization errors estimates are numerically shown to hold for several models. In the follow up paper [I. Vidanovic, A. Bogojevic, A. Balaz, and A. Belic, Phys. Rev. E 80, 066706 (2009)] we present and analyze substantial improvements that result from the merger of this approach with the recently introduced effective-action scheme for high-precision calculation of short-time propagation.

Properties of quantum systems via diagonalization of transition amplitudes. II. Systematic improvements of short-time propagation.

In this paper, building on a previous analysis [I. Vidanovic, A. Bogojevic, and A. Belic, preceding paper, Phys. Rev. E 80, 066705 (2009)] of exact diagonalization of the space-discretized evolution operator for the study of properties of nonrelativistic quantum systems, we present a substantial improvement to this method. We apply recently introduced effective action approach for obtaining short-time expansion of the propagator up to very high orders to calculate matrix elements of space-discretized evolution operator. This improves by many orders of magnitude previously used approximations for discretized matrix elements and allows us to numerically obtain large numbers of accurate energy eigenvalues and eigenstates using numerical diagonalization. We illustrate this approach on several one- and two-dimensional models. The quality of numerically calculated higher-order eigenstates is assessed by comparison with semiclassical cumulative density of states.