Analysing the concept of “beauty”

The article reveals the origin and expression of the concept of “beauty” as one of the central concepts of “The Collector” by John Fowles. Analyzing this work within the study of cognitive linguistics, authors used the method of linguo-poetic description of the text to embrace the variety of its semantic units and to discover its complexity and multivalence. Considering the number of mentioning and the diversity of lexical units, authors represented the linguistic expression of the aesthetic assessment of the concept of “beauty”. Authors concluded that the value and the significance of the concept of “beauty” are rather high as it gains broad semantic diversity, demonstrates the variety of connotations and presence of assessing component.peer-reviewe

A Trap-Door Mechanism for Zinc Acquisition by Streptococcus pneumoniae AdcA.

Zinc is an essential element in all domains of life. Nonetheless, how prokaryotes achieve selective acquisition of zinc from the extracellular environment remains poorly understood. Here, we elucidate a novel mechanism for zinc-binding in AdcA, a solute-binding protein of Streptococcus pneumoniae. Crystal structure analyses reveal the two-domain organization of the protein and show that only the N-terminal domain (AdcAN) is necessary for zinc import. Zinc binding induces only minor changes in the global protein conformation of AdcA and stabilizes a highly mobile loop within the AdcAN domain. This loop region, which is conserved in zinc-specific solute-binding proteins, facilitates closure of the AdcAN binding site and is crucial for zinc acquisition. Collectively, these findings elucidate the structural and functional basis of selective zinc uptake in prokaryotes. IMPORTANCE Zinc is an essential nutrient for the virulence of bacterial pathogens such as Streptococcus pneumoniae. Many Gram-positive bacteria use a two-domain lipoprotein for zinc acquisition, but how this class of metal-recruiting proteins acquire zinc and interact with the uptake machinery has remained poorly defined. We report the first structure of a two-domain lipoprotein, AdcA from S. pneumoniae, and use computational, spectroscopic, and microbiological approaches to provide new insights into the functional basis of zinc recruitment. Our findings reveal that AdcA employs a novel mechanism for zinc binding that we have termed the “trap-door” mechanism, and we show how the static metal-binding site of the protein, which confers its selectivity for zinc ions, is combined with a dynamic surface element to facilitate zinc recruitment and import into the bacterium. Together, these findings expand our understanding of how bacteria acquire zinc from the environment and provide a foundation for inhibiting this process, through antimicrobial targeting of the dynamic structural elements to block bacterial zinc scavenging

The Concept “Youth” in English and Tatar Linguistic Cultures

The purpose of this article is to compare the concept of "youth" in two genetically unrelated languages – Tatar and English. The study implements methods of comparative, definitional, component and contextual analysis and ethnic-linguistic-culturological comparison. An exceptional importance of the concept of "youth" made it one of the key concepts of many peoples. In this paper, based on English and Tatar dictionaries, we presented the concept of "youth" in the form of a frame. We identified the distinctive and similar features of the concept of "youth" in English and Tatar. The materials of this article can be used in the practice of intercultural communication, in the translation process of teaching English to the Tatar audience at higher education institutions and schools in order to develop intercultural communication among learners