Effects of thermal fluctuation and the receptor-receptor interaction in bacterial chemotactic signalling and adaptation

Bacterial chemotaxis is controlled by the conformational changes of the receptors, in response to the change of the ambient chemical concentration. In a statistical mechanical approach, the signalling due to the conformational changes is a thermodynamic average quantity, dependent on the temperature and the total energy of the system, including both ligand-receptor interaction and receptor-receptor interaction. This physical theory suggests to biology a new understanding of cooperation in ligand binding and receptor signalling problems. How much experimental support of this approach can be obtained from the currently available data? What are the parameter values? What is the practical information for experiments? Here we make comparisons between the theory and recent experimental results. Although currently comparisons can only be semi-quantitative or qualitative, consistency is clearly shown. The theory also helps to sort a variety of data.Comment: 26 pages, revtex. Journal version. Analysis on another set of data on adaptation time is adde

Mapping of microsatellite loci and association of aorta atherosclerosis with LG VI markers in the rabbit.

Twenty-three rabbit microsatellites were extracted from the EMBL nucleotide database. Nine of these markers, together with nine earlier published microsatellite markers, were found to be polymorphic between the AX/JU and IIIVO/JU inbred strains. By using an F(2) intercross we could integrate five markers into the rabbit linkage map. One anonymous microsatellite marker could be assigned to chromosome 1, and one microsatellite marker, located within the metallothionein-1 gene, could be added to linkage group VI (LG VI). Three microsatellite markers (one anonymous, one located within the PMP2 gene, and one located within the FABP6 gene) constitute a new linkage group (LG XI). We also measured the degree of dietary cholesterol-induced aorta atherosclerosis in the F(2) animals. A significant cosegregation was found between the degree of aorta atherosclerosis and the allelic variation of the biochemical marker Est-2 on LG VI in male rabbits. This association was not found in female rabbits

Toward Distributed GQM ………………………………………………………………………

Software ………………………………………………………………………………………...