Synthetic Mimics of Bacterial Lipid A Trigger Optical Transitions in Liquid Crystal Microdroplets at Ultralow Picogram-per-Milliliter Concentrations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We report synthetic six-tailed mimics of the bacterial glycolipid Lipid A that trigger changes in the internal ordering of water-dispersed liquid crystal (LC) microdroplets at ultralow (picogram-per-milliliter) concentrations. These molecules represent the first class of synthetic amphiphiles to mimic the ability of Lipid A and bacterial endotoxins to trigger optical responses in LC droplets at these ultralow concentrations. This behavior stands in contrast to all previously reported synthetic surfactants and lipids, which require near-complete monolayer coverage at the LC droplet surface to trigger ordering transitions. Surface-pressure measurements and SAXS experiments reveal these six-tailed synthetic amphiphiles to mimic key aspects of the self-assembly of Lipid A at aqueous interfaces and in solution. These and other results suggest that these amphiphiles trigger orientational transitions at ultralow concentrations through a unique mechanism that is similar to that of Lipid A and involves formation of inverted self-associated nanostructures at topological defects in the LC droplets.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".