Polyphosphate metabolism in Escherichia coli was studied in order to determine the role of polyphosphates in energy and phosphate metabolism. Phosphate-shift experiments were performed on wild-type E. coli W3110 and on an E. coli strain mutant in the genes encoding the polyphosphate-metabolizing enzymes polyphosphate kinase (PPK) and polyphosphatase (PPX). The levels of polyphosphates were measured by [31P]NMR, and the activities of PPK and PPX were measured using enzymatic assays. During phosphate starvation, the intracellular level of polyphosphate was not detectable in E. coli W3110; the activities of PPX and alkaline phosphatase were high relative to those during exponential growth. During the shift from phosphate starvation to phosphate surplus conditions, PPX activity decreased and PPK activity and intracellular polyphosphate stores increased dramatically. These results imply an important role for polyphosphates in cellular energy and phosphate storage and in adaptation to adverse growth conditions.
In 1984, [Duncan (1984)][1] demonstrated that visual attention prioritizes whole objects: subjects performed better when reporting two features on the same object than when reporting one feature from each of two adjacent objects. This marked the beginning of the field of object-based attention
The insertion of an iridium complex into an N-H bond in ammonia leads to a stable monomeric amido hydride complex in solution at room temperature. This reaction advances the transition-metal coordination chemistry of ammonia beyond its role for more than a century as an ancillary ligand. The precursor for this insertion reaction is an iridium(I) olefin complex with an aliphatic ligand containing one carbon and two phosphorus donor atoms. Kinetic and isotopic labeling studies indicate that olefin dissociates to give a 14-electron iridium(I) fragment, which then reacts with ammonia. This cleavage of the N-H bond under neutral conditions provides a foundation on which to develop future mild catalytic transformations of ammonia, such as olefin hydroamination and arene oxidative amination.
The authors present a real-time algorithm for the inverse kinematics of general 6R robot manipulators. The algorithm involves symbolic preprocessing, matrix computation and a variety of numerical techniques. The numerical accuracy of these operations is well understood and for most cases it is possible to compute accurate solutions using 64-b IEEE floating point arithmetic available on most workstations. The average running time of the algorithm, for most cases, is 11 ms on an IBM RS/6000 workstation.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>
An earlier procedure for the facile preparation of benzo-fused 1,5-dithiocins 2a-2c from o-mercapto- benzaldehydes has been improved and shown to be capable of extension to the preparation of several naphthalene-derived analogues. The general method also afforded several N-alkylated 1,5-dithiocins 4, 5 by replacing NH 3 with the appropriate primary amine. It was found that N-acylation of the 1,5-dithiocins was successful only with methyl chloroformate. Attempted N-phenylation met with limited success but was shown to be unnecessary since even the less reactive aniline readily undergoes the general reaction of primary amines. When simple α-amino acids, or their methyl esters, were employed as the primary amine in the reaction with o-mercaptobenzaldehyde, the formation of the N-alkylated 1,5-dithiocins 4a, 17a,17b with accompanying loss of -COOH or -COOMe was observed, in preparatively useful yields. A mechanism is proposed for this interesting transformation.Key words: 1,5-dithiocins, α-amino acids, N-acylation, decarboxylation.
