Assembly of the hexameric Escherichia coli arginine repressor investigated by nano-electrospray ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry

The arginine repressor (ArgR) from Escherichia coli regulates genes for L-arginine metabolism and is a required recombination factor for colE1 plasmid replication. Both functions require binding of L-arginine to the protein. In this work, nano-electrospray ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (nano-ESI-TOFMS) is used to study conformational and oligomeric states of intact ArgR and its isolated structural domains. In agreement with X-ray diffraction studies, it is shown that ArgR oligomerizes to form hexamers in both the presence and absence of L-arginine, and the basic unit of oligomerization appears to be the trimer. Higher-order assembly into dodecamers is also detected. The isolated C-terminal domain is found to associate into trimers and hexamers whereas the N-terminal domain is detected in its monomeric form. The observed species distributions suggest a role for the N-terminal domain in hexamer stabilization.     

Surface characterization of Pt electrodes using underpotential deposition of H and Cu: Part I. Pt(100)

This paper is the first in a series describing the in situ surface characterization of platinum electrodes using H and Cu deposited at underpotentials. The surface of a Pt(100) electrode pretreated by simple flame annealing and quenching in aqueous sulfuric acid is shown to contain a high concentration of defects such as vacancies and self-adsorbed Pt atoms. Adsorbed hydrogen is more strongly bound at these defects than on a uniform Pt(100) surface. Potential cycling in 1 M HCl produces a higher concentration of defects, while oxide formation and reduction in 0.5 M H₂SO₄ has the opposite effect. The nature of (100)-like sites at a polycrystalline platinum electrode is also discussed.     

The Landau-Lifshitz equation,elliptic curves and the ward transform

The Landau-Lifshitz (LL) equation is studied from a point of view that is close to that of Segal and Wilson's work on KdV. The LL hierarchy is defined and shown to exist using a dressing transformation that involves parameters ₁, ₂, ₃ that live on an elliptic curve . The crucial role of the groupK ₂ × ₂ of translations by the half-periods of and its non-trivial central extension is brought out and an analogue of Birkhoff factorisation for -equivariant loops in is given. This factorisation theorem is given two treatments, one in terms of the geometry of an infinite-dimensional Grassmannian, and the other in terms of the algebraic geometry of bundles over . Further, a Ward-like transform between a class of holomorphic vector bundles on the total spaceZ of a line-bundle over and solutions of LL is constructed. An appendix is devoted to a careful definition of the Grassmannian of the Frechet spaceC (S ¹).