Confrontation Confronted

The following article is an edited version of the amicus curiae brief filed with the Supreme Court of the United States in the October Term, 1998, in the case of Benjamin Lee Lilly v. Commonwealth of Virginia(No.98-5881). This case raises important questions about the confrontation clause, which has been a vital ingredient of the fair trial right for hundreds of years, Professor Richard Friedman and his co-authors say. In particular, this case presents the Court with an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between the confrontation clause and the law of hearsay. On June 10 the Court handed down a decision in favor of Lilly. Justice Stephen Breyer, a member of the plurality, wrote a concurring opinion citing this brief favorably and suggested that a future case might call for the Court to adopt its approach

Confrontation Confronted

The following article is an edited version of the amicus curiae brief filed with the Supreme Court of the United States in the October Term, 1998, in the case of Benjamin Lee Lilly v. Commonwealth of Virginia (No. 98-5881). This case raises important questions about the meaning of the confrontation clause, which has been a vital ingredient of the fair trial right for hundreds of years, Professor Richard Friedman and his co-authors say. In particular, this case presents the Court with an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between the confrontation clause and the law of hearsay. On June 10 the Court handed down a decision in favor of Lilly. Justice Stephen Breyer, a member of the plurality, wrote a concurring opinion citing this brief favorably and suggested that a future case might call for the Court to adopt its approach

Self-interaction chromatography as a tool for optimizing conditions for membrane protein crystallization

The second virial coefficient, or B value, is a measurement of how well a protein interacts with itself in solution. These interactions can lead to protein crystallization or precipitation, depending on their strength, with a narrow range of B values (the `crystallization slot') being known to promote crystallization. A convenient method of determining the B value is by self-interaction chromatography. This paper describes how the light-harvesting complex 1-reaction centre core complex from Allochromatium vinosum yielded single straight-edged crystals after iterative cycles of self-interaction chromatography and crystallization. This process allowed the rapid screening of small molecules and detergents as crystallization additives. Here, a description is given of how self-interaction chromatography has been utilized to improve the crystallization conditions of a membrane protein

Embedded-Cluster Calculations in a Numeric Atomic Orbital Density-Functional Theory Framework

We integrate the all-electron electronic structure code FHI-aims into the general ChemShell package for solid-state embedding (QM/MM) calculations. A major undertaking in this integration is the implementation of pseudopotential functionality into FHI-aims to describe cations at the QM/MM boundary through effective core potentials and therewith prevent spurious overpolarization of the electronic density. Based on numeric atomic orbital basis sets, FHI-aims offers particularly efficient access to exact exchange and second order perturbation theory, rendering the established QM/MM setup an ideal tool for hybrid and double-hybrid level DFT calculations of solid systems. We illustrate this capability by calculating the reduction potential of Fe in the Fe-substituted ZSM-5 zeolitic framework and the reaction energy profile for (photo-)catalytic water oxidation at TiO2(110).Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure