Bacillus subtilis lipase a—lipase or esterase?

The question of how to distinguish between lipases and esterases is about as old as the definition of the subclassification is. Many different criteria have been proposed to this end, all indicative but not decisive. Here, the activity of lipases in dry organic solvents as a criterion is probed on a minimal α/β hydrolase fold enzyme, the...

Modeling nonlinear moisture diffusion in inhomogeneous media

While moisture diffusion in microelectronic device and packaging has been studied for decades, the problems involving complex nonlinear moisture diffusion in multi-material assembly have not been fully studied. This paper has developed a general nonlinear diffusion model by adopting water activity, a continuous state variable, as the field...