No abstract

The clinical impact of severe infections with yeasts and yeast-like fungi has increased, especially in immunocompromised hosts. In recent years, new antifungal agents with different and partially species-specific activity patterns have become available. Therefore, rapid and reliable species identification is essential for antifungal treatment; however, conventional biochemical methods are time-consuming and require considerable expertise. We

Recent advances in the development of chiral derivatizing and solvating agents that facilitate the determination of enantiomeric excess and absolute configuration are reviewed. These include metal-containing species, host-guest systems, donor-acceptor compounds, and liquid crystal discriminating agents. In the aggregate, these reagents can be used to analyze a wide range of compound classes.

We describe a new technique to determine the homogeneous linewidths of surface plasmon resonances of metal nanoparticles and thus measure the decay time of this collective electron excitation. The method is based on spectral hole burning and has been applied to supported oblate Ag particles with radii of 7.5 nm. From the experimental results and a theoretical model of hole burning the linewidth of 260 meV corresponding to a decay time of 4.8 fs was extracted. This value is shorter than expected for damping by bulk electron scattering. We conclude that additional damping mechanisms have been observed and reflect confinement of the electrons in nanoparticles with sizes below 10 nm.