Systematic analysis reveals novel insight into the molecular determinants of function, diversity and evolution of sweet taste receptors T1R2/T1R3 in primates

Sweet taste is a primary sensation for the preference and adaption of primates to diet, which is crucial for their survival and fitness. It is clear now that the sweet perception is mediated by a G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR)-sweet taste receptor T1R2/T1R3, and many behavioral or physiological experiments have described the diverse sweet taste sensitivities in primates. However, the structure-function relationship of T1R2s/T1R3s in primates, especially the molecular basis for their species-dependent sweet taste, has not been well understood until now. In this study, we performed a comprehensive sequence, structural and functional analysis of sweet taste receptors in primates to elucidate the molecular determinants mediating their species-dependent sweet taste recognition. Our results reveal distinct taxonomic distribution and significant characteristics (interaction, coevolution and epistasis) of specific key function-related residues, which could partly account for the previously reported behavioral results of taste perception in primates. Moreover, the prosimians Lemuriformes species, which were reported to have no sensitivity to aspartame, could be proposed to be aspartame tasters based on the present analysis. Collectively, our study provides new insights and promotes a better understanding for the diversity, function and evolution of sweet taste receptors in primates

Understanding and Detecting Concurrency Attacks

Just like bugs in single-threaded programs can lead to vulnerabilities, bugs in multithreaded programs can also lead to concurrency attacks. Unfortunately, there is little quantitative data on how well existing tools can detect these attacks. This paper presents the first quantitative study on concurrency attacks and their implications on tools. Our study on 10 widely used programs reveals 26 concurrency attacks with broad threats (e.g., OS privilege escalation), and we built scripts to successfully exploit 10 attacks. Our study further reveals that, only extremely small portions of inputs and thread interleavings (or schedules) can trigger these attacks, and existing concurrency bug detectors work poorly because they lack help to identify the vulnerable inputs and schedules. Our key insight is that the reports in existing detectors have implied moderate hints on what inputs and schedules will likely lead to attacks and what will not (e.g., benign bug reports). With this insight, this paper presents a new directed concurrency attack detection approach and its implementation, OWL. It extracts hints from the reports with static analysis, augments existing detectors by pruning out the benign inputs and schedules, and then directs detectors and its own runtime vulnerability verifiers to work on the remaining, likely vulnerable inputs and schedules. Evaluation shows that OWL reduced 94.3% reports caused by benign inputs or schedules and detected 7 known concurrency attacks. OWL also detected 3 previously unknown concurrency attacks, including a use-after-free attack in SSDB confirmed as CVE-2016-1000324, an integer overflow, HTML integrity violation in Apache and three new MySQL data races confirmed with bug ID 84064, 84122, 84241. All OWL source code, exploit scripts, and results are available at https://github.com/ruigulala/ConAnalysis

Mobile defects as mediated states for charge-carrier trapping in metal halide perovskites quantum dots

The migration motion of defects in metal halide perovskites quantum dots (MHPQDs) results in charge-carrier trapping become more complicated. We study two-step trapping mediated by mobile defects between the ground state of MHPQDs and a fixed-depth defect using a full-configuration defect method, where all possible trapping processes mediated by these mobile defects could be reproduced and the fastest channels among them are picked out. We find that these two-step trapping processes could keep more one order of magnitude faster than these direct ones as mobile defect with the appropriate localization strength, which implies that these indirect trapping should play the crucial rule to determine the non-radiative recombination losses. These results provide the significant explanation for studying non-radiation processes of carriers in the presence of the migration defects in recent experiments. Moreover, this model will be available to analyze some key performance related defects in electronic devices.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Characterization of dynamic morphological changes of tin anode electrode during (de)lithiation processes using in operando synchrotron transmission X-ray microscopy

The morphological evolution of tin particles with different sizes during the first lithiation and delithiation processes has been visualized by an in operando synchrotron transmission X-ray microscope (TXM). The in operando lithium ion battery cell was operated at constant current condition during TXM imaging. Two-dimensional projection images with 40 nm resolution showing morphological evolution were obtained and analyzed. The analysis of relative area change shows that the morphology of tin particles with different sizes changed simultaneously. This phenomenon is mainly due to a negative feedback mechanism among tin particles in the battery electrode at a constant current operating condition. For irregular-shaped tin particles, the contour analysis shows that the regions with higher curvature started volume expansion first, and then the entire particle expanded almost homogeneously. This study provides insights for understanding the dynamic morphological change and the particle-particle interactions in high capacity lithium ion battery electrodes

Microscopic theory of Raman scattering for the rotational organic cation in metal halide perovskites

A gap exists in microscopic understanding the dynamic properties of the rotational organic cation (ROC) in the inorganic framework of the metal halide perovskites (MHP) to date. Herein, we develop a microscopic theory of Raman scattering for the ROC in MHP based on the angular momentum of a ROC exchanging with that of the photon and phonon. We systematically present the selection rules for the angular momentum transfer among three lowest rotational levels. We find that the phonon angular momentum that arising from the inorganic framework and its specific values could be directly manifested by Stokes (or anti-Stokes) shift. Moreover, the initial orientation of the ROC and its preferentially rotational directions could be judged in Raman spectra. This study lays the theoretical foundation for the high-precision resolution and manipulation of molecular rotation immersed in many-body environment by Raman technique

Electronic structure of Fe1.04(Te0.66Se0.34)

We report the electronic structure of the iron-chalcogenide superconductor, Fe1.04(Te0.66Se0.34), obtained with high resolution angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy and density functional calculations. In photoemission measurements, various photon energies and polarizations are exploited to study the Fermi surface topology and symmetry properties of the bands. The measured band structure and their symmetry characters qualitatively agree with our density function theory calculations of Fe(Te0.66Se0.34), although the band structure is renormalized by about a factor of three. We find that the electronic structures of this iron-chalcogenides and the iron-pnictides have many aspects in common, however, significant differences exist near the Gamma-point. For Fe1.04(Te0.66Se0.34), there are clearly separated three bands with distinct even or odd symmetry that cross the Fermi energy (EF) near the zone center, which contribute to three hole-like Fermi surfaces. Especially, both experiments and calculations show a hole-like elliptical Fermi surface at the zone center. Moreover, no sign of spin density wave was observed in the electronic structure and susceptibility measurements of this compound.Comment: 7 pages, 9 figures. submitted to PRB on November 15, 2009, and accepted on January 6, 201