Cloning and expression of first gene for biodegrading microcystins by Sphingopyxis sp. USTB-05

Harmful cyanobacterial blooms (HCBs) in natural waters are a growing environmental problem worldwide because microcystins (MCs) produced by cyanobacteria are potent hepatotoxins and tumor promoters. MCs are resistant against physical and chemical factors. Thus, biodegradation is the most efficient method for removing MCs, and a number of bacterial strains, especially genus _Sphingomonas_, have been isolated for biodegrading MCs. Although the pathway, enzyme, and gene for biodegrading MCs by _Sphingomonas sp._ have been widely identified recently, no gene concerned with the biodegradation of MCs has been successfully cloned and expressed. In this study, we show that the first and most important gene of mlrA, containing 1,008 bp nucleotides in length, in the biodegradation pathway of MCs by _Sphingopyxis sp._ USTB-05, which encodes an enzyme MlrA containing 336 amino acid residues, is firstly cloned and expressed in _E. coli_ DH5α, with a cloning vector of pGEM-T easy and an expression vector of pGEX-4T-1. The encoded and expressed enzyme MlrA is responsible for cleaving the target peptide bond between 3-amino-9-methoxy-2,6,8-trimethyl-10-phenyl-deca-4,6-dienoic acid (Adda) and Arg in the cyclic structure of microcystin-RR （MC-RR）and microcystin-LR（MC-LR), two typical and toxic types of MCs. Linear MC-RR and MC-LR are produced as the first products. These findings are important in constructing a new genetic bacterial strain for the efficient removal of MCs from the important water supplies and resolving the controversy on the biodegradation pathway of different types of MCs by genus _Sphingomonas_

Fragmentation functions of polarized heavy quarkonium

Study of the polarized heavy quarkonium production in recently proposed QCD factorization formalism requires knowledge of a large number of input fragmentation functions (FFs) from a single parton or a heavy quark-antiquark pair to a polarized heavy quarkonium. In this paper, we calculate these FFs at the input scale in terms of nonrelativistic QCD (NRQCD) factorization. We derive all relevant polarized NRQCD long-distance matrix elements based symmetries and propose a self-consistent scheme to define them in arbitrary $d$ dimensions. We then calculate polarized input FFs contributed from all $S$-wave and $P$-wave NRQCD intermediate states. With our calculation of the polarized input FFs, and the partonic hard part available in literatures, the QCD factorization formalism is ready to be applied to polarized heavy quarkonium production.Comment: 30 pages, 1 figur