Communication of mitochondria with the rest of the cell requires beta-barrel proteins of the outer membrane. All beta-barrel proteins are synthesized as precursors in the cytosol and imported into mitochondria by the general translocase TOM and the sorting machinery SAM. The SAM complex contains two proteins essential for cell viability, the channel-forming Sam50 and Sam35. We have identified t...

Pathogenic bacteria secrete pore-forming toxins (PFTs) to attack target cells. PFTs are expressed as water-soluble monomeric proteins, which oligomerize into nonlytic prepore intermediates on the target cell membrane before forming membrane-spanning pores. Despite a wealth of biochemical data, the lack of high-resolution prepore structural information has hampered understanding of the β-barrel ...

Enzymes with the (b/a)8-barrel fold are involved in the catalysis of a wide variety of biochemical reactions. The active sites of these enzymes are located on the C-terminal face of the central b-barrel. Conserved amino acid sequence, as well as secondary, tertiary and quaternary structure patterns are providing a rich body of data to support the premise of a common ancestry of many members of ...

Many pathogenic bacteria produce pore-forming toxins to attack and kill human cells. We have determined the 4.5 Å structure of the ~2.2 MDa pore complex of pneumolysin, the main virulence factor of Streptococcus pneumoniae, by cryoEM. The pneumolysin pore is a 400 Å ring of 42 membrane-inserted monomers. Domain 3 of the soluble toxin refolds into two ~85 Å β-hairpins that traverse the lipid bil...

The mitochondrial outer membrane contains two protein translocators: the TOM40 and TOB/SAM complexes. Mdm10 is distributed in the TOB complex for beta-barrel protein assembly and in the MMM1 complex for tethering of the endoplasmic reticulum and mitochondria. Here, we establish a system in which the Mdm10 level in the TOB complex--but not in the MMM1 complex--is altered to analyse its part in b...

The membrane domain of OmpA consists of an eight-stranded all-next-neighbor antiparallel beta-barrel with short turns at the periplasmic barrel end and long flexible loops at the external end. The structure analysis has been extended from medium resolution to 1. 65 A (1 A=0.1 nm), and the molecular model has been refined anisotropically to show oriented mobilities of the structural elements. Th...

Although the mechanisms underlying the spatial pattern formation of sensory maps have been extensively investigated, those triggering sensory map formation during development are largely unknown. Here we show that the birth of pups instructively and selectively regulates the initiation of barrel formation in the somatosensory cortex by reducing serotonin concentration. We found that preterm bir...

Texture discrimination is a fundamental function of somatosensory systems, yet the manner by which texture is coded and spatially represented in the barrel cortex are largely unknown. Using in vivo two-photon calcium imaging in the rat barrel cortex during artificial whisking against different surface coarseness or controlled passive whisker vibrations simulating different coarseness, we show t...

Many outer membrane proteins (OMPs) in Gram-negative bacteria possess known -barrel three-dimensional (3D) structures. These proteins, including channel-forming transmembrane porins, are diverse in sequence but exhibit common structural features. We here report computational analyses of six outer membrane proteins of known 3D structures with respect to (1) secondary structure, (2) hydropathy, a...

Abstract Aiming at the problem that effect of barrel erosion is rarely used as a quantitative constraint in past interior ballistic design process, optimization has been done for large-caliber gun to improve life and performance ballistic, equivalent full charges (EFCs) completed by combining different models with model. The simulation represented minimization ablation realized parameters reduc...