Solid-Phase Synthesis and Application of a Clickable Version of Epoxomicin for Proteasome Activity Analysis

Degradation of proteins by the proteasome is an essential cellular process and one that many wish to study in a variety of disease types. There are commercially available probes that can monitor proteasome activity in cells, but they typically contain common fluorophores that limit their simultaneous use with other activity-based probes. In order to exchange the fluorophore or incorporate an enrichment tag, the proteasome probe likely has to be synthesized which can be cumbersome. Here, we describe a simple synthetic procedure that only requires one purification step to generate epoxomicin, a selective proteasome inhibitor, with a terminal alkyne. Through a copper-catalyzed cycloaddition, any moiety containing an azide can be incorporated into the probe. Many fluorophores are commercially available that contain an azide that can be “clicked”, allowing this proteasome activity probe to be included into already established assays to monitor both proteasome activity and other cellular activities of interest.     

Plant Growth-Defense Trade-Offs: Molecular Processes Leading to Physiological Changes

In order to survive in a hostile habitat, plants have to manage the available resources to reach a delicate balance between development and defense processes, setting up what plant scientists call a trade-off. Most of these processes are basically responses to stimuli sensed by plant cell receptors and are influenced by the environmental features, which can incredibly modify such responses and even cause changes upon both molecular and phenotypic level. Therefore, significant differences can be detected between plants of the same species living in different environments. The comprehension of plant growth-defense trade-offs from the molecular basis to the phenotypic expression is one of the fundamentals for developing sustainable agriculture, so with this review we intend to contribute to the increasing of knowledge on this topic, which have a great importance for future development of agricultural crop production.     

Improving the accuracy of machine-learning models with data from machine test repetitions

Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing - The modelling of machining processes by means of machine-learning algorithms is still based on principles that are especially adapted to mechanical...     

Co‐optimisation of the emitter region and the metal grid of silicon solar cells

The procedure for the simultaneous optimisation of the dopant density profile and the front metal grid of silicon solar cells is illustrated with representative cases of laboratory and commercial devices. Contour plots for the saturation current density and the photo‐generated current density of phosphorus doped emitter regions of silicon solar cells are calculated as a function of emitter thickness and dopant concentration, for the particular case of Gaussian dopant profiles. To expose the competing factors of surface and bulk emitter recombination, grid shading and series resistance, the other regions of the device are assumed ideal, that is, loss‐less. The calculated contour plots of the conversion efficiency indicate that relatively thick emitters are optimum if surface passivation is available, whereas thin, heavily doped emitters are preferable in the absence of surface passivation. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.