Substrate entering and product leaving trajectories predict an engulfing dynamic for the major conformational change of the β-lactam acylase

It is still a major challenge to acquire insight into the conformational changes between the ground state and the transition state of an enzyme, although conformational fluctuation within interconverting conformers has been widely investigated (1-4). Here, we utilize different enzymatic reactions in b-lactam acylase to figure out the substrate/product trajectories in the enzyme, thereby probing the overall conformational changes in transition state. First, an auto-proteolytic intermediate of cephalosporin acylase (EC 3.5.1.11) with partial spacer segment was identified. As a final proteolytic step, the deletion of this spacer segment was revealed to be a first-order reaction, suggesting an intramolecular Ntn mechanism for the auto-proteolysis. Accordingly, the different proteolytic sites in the acylase precursor indicate a substrate entering pathway along the spacer peptide. Second, bromoacyl-7ACA can interact with penicillin G acylase (EC 3.5.1.11) in two distinguish aspects, to be hydrolyzed as a substrate analogue and to affinity alkylate the conserved Trpb4 as a product analogue. The kinetic correlation between these two reactions suggests a channel opening from Serb1 to Trpb4, responsible for the main product leaving. These two reaction trajectories relaying at the active centre, together with the crystal structures (5-10), predict an engulfing dynamic involving pocket constriction and channel opening

Improving the security of multiparty quantum secret sharing against Trojan horse attack

We analyzed the security of the multiparty quantum secret sharing (MQSS) protocol recently proposed by Zhang, Li and Man [Phys. Rev. A \textbf{71}, 044301 (2005)] and found that this protocol is secure for any other eavesdropper except for the agent Bob who prepares the quantum signals as he can attack the quantum communication with a Trojan horse. That is, Bob replaces the single-photon signal with a multi-photon one and the other agent Charlie cannot find this cheating as she does not measure the photons before they runs back from the boss Alice, which reveals that this MQSS protocol is not secure for Bob. Finally, we present a possible improvement of the MQSS protocol security with two single-photon measurements and six unitary operations.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures; The revised version of the paper published in Phys. Rev. A 72, 044302 (2005). A bug is modified and an addendum is adde

Remote information concentration and multipartite entanglement in multilevel systems

Remote information concentration (RIC) in $d$-level systems (qudits) is studied. It is shown that the quantum information initially distributed in three spatially separated qudits can be remotely and deterministically concentrated to a single qudit via an entangled channel without performing any global operations. The entangled channel can be different types of genuine multipartite pure entangled states which are inequivalent under local operations and classical communication. The entangled channel can also be a mixed entangled state, even a bound entangled state which has a similar form to the Smolin state, but has different features from the Smolin state. A common feature of all these pure and mixed entangled states is found, i.e., they have $d^2$ common commuting stabilizers. The differences of qudit-RIC and qubit-RIC ($d=2$) are also analyzed.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure