Status Report of LNS Accelerator Complex in 2002(IV. Status Report of LNS Accelerator Complex in 2002)

Operation status of an electron accelerator complex at Laboratory of Nuclear Science, Tohoku University is reported. After a completion of a new building containing an experimental vault, the inspection for the radiation safety was done in the beginning of October, 2003, so that most of user machine time was consumed in the latter half of the fiscal year 2002

Status Report of LNS Accelerator Complex in 2001(IV. Status Report of LNS Accelerator Complex in 2001)

The electron accelerator complex at the Laboratory of Nuclear Science, Tohoku University has been operated for various fields of science. A 35-year-old 300 MeV electron linac is still working well. However troubles due to aging is rapidly getting serious. In addition, because of multi-purpose use of the linac many different beam characteristics are requested by the users, so that the operation mode has been complicate. In this report, the operation status of the accelerator complex including major troubles experienced in the fiscal year 2001 is described and future plan is shortly discussed by showing the present machine operation

Mon1-Ccz1 activates Rab7 only on late endosomes and dissociates from the lysosome in mammalian cells

Rab GTPases act as molecular switches regulating various aspects of membrane trafficking. Among them, Rab5 and Rab7 play central roles in the endolysosomal network. Although many effectors downstream of Rab7 have been elucidated, our present understanding of the mechanism regulating Rab7 activity is extremely limited. It has only recently been accepted that the Mon1-Ccz1 complex is a Rab7 guanine nucleotide exchange factor, but it still remains unclear what the location where Mon1-Ccz1 works with Rab7 is. To address what kind of change or switch exists in the regulatory mechanism upstream of Rab7 during its transition from the late endosome to lysosome, we examined Rab7 activity in steady-state cells and during EGF-induced macropinocytosis using a newly developed FRET sensor. A combination of a Rab7 sensor and confocal FRET imaging techniques revealed that the activation of Rab7 on late endosomes depends on Mon1-Ccz1 and is implicated in late-endosome-lysosome fusion. In contrast, Rab7 activity on lysosomes was independent of Mon1-Ccz1 and active Rab7 played a role in perinuclear clustering of lysosomes

Persistence of Covalent Bonding in Liquid Silicon Probed by Inelastic X-ray Scattering

Metallic liquid silicon at 1787K is investigated using x-ray Compton scattering. An excellent agreement is found between the measurements and the corresponding Car-Parrinello molecular dynamics simulations. Our results show persistence of covalent bonding in liquid silicon and provide support for the occurrence of theoretically predicted liquid-liquid phase transition in supercooled liquid states. The population of covalent bond pairs in liquid silicon is estimated to be 17% via a maximally-localized Wannier function analysis. Compton scattering is shown to be a sensitive probe of bonding effects in the liquid state.Comment: 5pages, 3 postscript figure

Electronic damage in S atoms in a native protein crystal induced by an intense X-ray free-electron laser pulse

Current hard X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) sources can deliver doses to biological macromolecules well exceeding 1 GGy, in timescales of a few tens of femtoseconds. During the pulse, photoionization can reach the point of saturation in which certain atomic species in the sample lose most of their electrons. This electronic radiation damage causes the atomic scattering factors to change, affecting, in particular, the heavy atoms, due to their higher photoabsorption cross sections. Here, it is shown that experimental serial femtosecond crystallography data collected with an extremely bright XFEL source exhibit a reduction of the effective scattering power of the sulfur atoms in a native protein. Quantitative methods are developed to retrieve information on the effective ionization of the damaged atomic species from experimental data, and the implications of utilizing new phasing methods which can take advantage of this localized radiation damage are discussed

Is the 7/2^<->_<1> isomer state of ^<43>S spherical?

We report on the spectroscopic quadrupole moment measurement of the 7/2−1 isomeric state in S271643 [E∗=320.5(5)  keV, T1/2=415(3)  ns], using the time dependent perturbed angular distribution technique at the RIKEN RIBF facility. Our value, ∣Qs∣=23(3)  efm2, is larger than that expected for a single-particle state. Shell model calculations using the modern SDPF-U interaction for this mass region reproduce remarkably well the measured ∣Qs∣, and show that non-negligible correlations drive the isomeric state away from a purely spherical shape

Experimental phasing with SHELXC/D/E: combining chain tracing with density modification

Experimental phasing with SHELXC/D/E has been enhanced by the incorporation of main-chain tracing into the iterative density modification; this also provides a simple and effective way of exploiting noncrystallographic symmetry