Sizing large proteins and protein complexes by electrospray ionization mass spectrometry and ion mobility

Mass spectrometry (MS) and ion mobility with electrospray ionization (ESI) have the capability to measure and detect large noncovalent protein-ligand and protein-protein complexes. Using an ion mobility method of gas-phase electrophoretic mobility molecular analysis (GEMMA), protein particles representing a range of sizes can be separated by their electrophoretic mobility in air. Highly charged particles produced from a protein complex solution using electrospray can be manipulated to produce singly charged ions, which can be separated and quantified by their electrophoretic mobility. Results from ESI-GEMMA analysis from our laboratory and others were compared with other experimental and theoretically determined parameters, such as molecular mass and cryoelectron microscopy and X-ray crystal structure dimensions. There is a strong correlation between the electrophoretic mobility diameter determined from GEMMA analysis and the molecular mass for protein complexes up to 12 MDa, including the 93 kDa enolase dimer, the 480 kDa ferritin 24-mer complex, the 4.6 MDa cowpea chlorotic mottle virus (CCMV), and the 9 MDa MVP-vault assembly. ESI-GEMMA is used to differentiate a number of similarly sized vault complexes that are composed of different N-terminal protein tags on the MVP subunit. The average effective density of the proteins and protein complexes studied was 0.6 g/cm(3). Moreover, there is evidence that proteins and protein complexes collapse or become more compact in the gas phase in the absence of water.     

Dynamical properties of water in living cells

With the aim of studying the effect of water dynamics on the properties of biological systems, in this paper, we present a quasi-elastic neutron scattering study on three different types of living cells, differing both in their morphological and tumor properties. The measured scattering signal, which essentially originates from hydrogen atoms present in the investigated systems, has been analyzed using a global fitting strategy using an optimized theoretical model that considers various classes of hydrogen atoms and allows disentangling diffusive and rotational motions. The approach has been carefully validated by checking the reliability of the calculation of parameters and their 99% confidence intervals. We demonstrate that quasi-elastic neutron scattering is a suitable experimental technique to characterize the dynamics of intracellular water in the angstrom/picosecond space/time scale and to investigate the effect of water dynamics on cellular biodiversity.     

Extended scaling and residual flavor symmetry in the neutrino Majorana mass matrix

The European Physical Journal C - We consider the flavor-changing decays of the Higgs boson in a grand unified theory framework which is based on the SU(5) gauge group and implements the principle...     

Near field imaging of small isotropic and extended anisotropic scatterers

In this paper, we consider two time-harmonic inverse scattering problems of reconstructing penetrable inhomogeneous obstacles from near field measurements. First, we appeal to the Born approximation for reconstructing small isotropic scatterers via the MUSIC algorithm. Some numerical reconstructions using the MUSIC algorithm are provided for reconstructing the scatterer and piecewise constant refractive index using a Bayesian method. We then consider the reconstruction of an anisotropic extended scatterer by a modified linear sampling method and the factorization method applied to the near field operator. This provides a rigorous characterization of the support of the anisotropic obstacle in terms of a range test derived from the measured data. Under appropriate assumptions on the material parameters, the derived factorization can be used to determine the support of the medium without a priori knowledge of the material properties.     

Quasi-TEM mode propagation in twin-wire THz waveguides

We numerically investigate the trade-offs between the dispersion properties,coupling efficiency,and geometrical constraints in dual-wire (twin-lead) terahertz (THz) waveguides.In particular,we show that their inherent linearly polarized quasi-transverse electromagnetic (TEM) modes exist for waveguide transverse dimensions comparable with the wavelength,enabling significant end-fire coupling (>10%) for numericalaperture limited Gaussian beams while supporting a relatively low-dispersion propagation of below 0.5 ps 2 /m,as desired for short-pulse time-domain spectroscopy applications.Starting from the dual-wire structure,we also demonstrate that low-dispersion tapers can be designed to improve coupling efficiency.