Cytosolic Cysteine Synthase Switch Cysteine and Mimosine Production in <Emphasis Type="Italic">Leucaena leucocephala</Emphasis>

In higher plants, multiple copies of the cysteine synthase gene are present for cysteine biosynthesis. Some of these genes also have the potential to produce various kinds of β-substitute alanine. In the present study, we cloned a 1275-bp cDNA for cytosolic O-acetylserine(thiol)lyase (cysteine synthase) (Cy-OASTL) from Leucaena leucocephala. The purified protein product showed a dual function of cysteine and mimosine synthesis. Kinetics studies showed pH optima of 7.5 and 8.0, while temperature optima of 40 and 35 °C, respectively, for cysteine and mimosine synthesis. The kinetic parameters such as apparent K_m, k_cat were determined for both cysteine and mimosine synthesis with substrates O-acetylserine (OAS) and Na₂S or 3-hydroxy-4-pyridone (3H4P). From the in vitro results with the common substrate OAS, the apparent k_cat for Cys production is over sixfold higher than mimosine synthesis and the apparent K_m is 3.7 times lower, suggesting Cys synthesis is the favored pathway.     

Noise-robust realization of Turing-complete cellular automata by using neural networks with pattern representation

A modularly-structured neural network model is considered. Each module, which we call a ‘cell’, consists of two parts: a Hopfield neural network model and a multilayered perceptron. An array of such cells is used to simulate the Rule 110 cellular automaton with high accuracy even when all the units of neural networks are replaced by stochastic binary ones. We also find that noise not only degrades but also facilitates computation if the outputs of multilayered perceptrons are below the threshold required to update the states of the cells, which is a stochastic resonance in computation.