High energy-charged cell factory for heterologous protein synthesis

Overexpression of gluconeogenic phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase (PCK) under glycolytic conditions enables Escherichia coli to maintain a greater intracellular ATP concentration and, consequently, to up-regulate genes for amino acid and nucleotide biosynthesis. To investigate the effect of a high intracellular ATP concentration on heterologous protein synthesis, we studied the expression of a foreign gene product, enhanced green fluorescence protein (eGFP), under control of the T7 promoter in E. coli BL21(DE3) strain overexpressing PCK. This strain was able to maintain twice as much intracellular ATP and to express two times more foreign protein than the control strain. These results indicate that a high energy-charged cell can be beneficial as a protein-synthesizing cell factory. The potential uses of such a cell factory are discussed

Effects of phytoestrogen on sexual development

Phytoestrogen is an estrogenic compound that occurs naturally in plants. The most common sources of phytoestrogen are soybean products, which contain high levels of isoflavones. This compound, which has structural similarity with estrogen, can act as an estrogen receptor agonist or antagonist. Animal studies provide evidence of the significant effects of phytoestrogen on sexual development, including altered pubertal timing, impaired estrous cycling and ovarian function, and altered hypothalamus and pituitary functions. Although human studies examining the effects of phytoestrogen on sexual development are extremely limited, the results of some studies agree with those of the animal studies. In this paper, we review the possible mechanism of phytoestrogen action and the evidence showing the effects of phytoestrogen on sexual development in animal and human studies

S/W Fault-tolerant OFP System for UAVs based on Partition Computing

AbstractPartition computing of the new Integrated Modular Avionics architecture reduces the heavy cabling of traditional federated architecture. On the other hand, fault-tolerant Operational Flight Programs (OFP) for unmanned aerial vehicles have usually been implemented as primary-backup systems based on dual nodes. However, in the case of a small UAV, it is preferred to implement a S/W fault-tolerant system that runs primary and recovery systems together in a single flight control computer to reduce the payload. In this case, because the primary and backup must not interfere with each other in using CPU and memory, it is common to use virtualization-based partitions. In this paper, a new S/W fault-tolerant OFP based on the real-time-object partition, TMO.p, is presented to overcome the large overheads of virtualization approaches