Producing gene deletions in Escherichia coli by P1 transduction with excisable antibiotic resistance cassettes

A first approach to study the function of an unknown gene in bacteria is to create a knock-out of this gene. Here, we describe a robust and fast protocol for transferring gene deletion mutations from one Escherichia coli strain to another by using generalized transduction with the bacteriophage P1. This method requires that the mutation be selectable (e.g., based on gene disruptions using antibiotic cassette insertions). Such antibiotic cassettes can be mobilized from a donor strain and introduced into a recipient strain of interest to quickly and easily generate a gene deletion mutant. The antibiotic cassette can be designed to include flippase recognition sites that allow the excision of the cassette by a site-specific recombinase to produce a clean knock-out with only a ~100-base-pair-long scar sequence in the genome. We demonstrate the protocol by knocking out the tamA gene encoding an assembly factor involved in autotransporter biogenesis and test the effect of this knock-out on the biogenesis and function of two trimeric autotransporter adhesins. Though gene deletion by P1 transduction has its limitations, the ease and speed of its implementation make it an attractive alternative to other methods of gene deletion

Performance tests of an AGIPD 0.4 assembly at the beamline P10 of PETRA III

The Adaptive Gain Integrating Pixel Detector (AGIPD) is a novel detector system, currently under development by a collaboration of DESY, the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, the University of Hamburg and the University of Bonn, and is primarily designed for use at the European XFEL. To verify key features of this detector, an AGIPD 0.4 test chip assembly was tested at the P10 beamline of the PETRA III synchrotron at DESY. The test chip successfully imaged both the direct synchrotron beam and single 7.05 keV photons at the same time, demonstrating the large dynamic range required for XFEL experiments. X-ray scattering measurements from a test sample agree with standard measurements and show the chip's capability of observing dynamics at the microsecond time scale.Comment: revised version after peer revie

PT Symmetric, Hermitian and P-Self-Adjoint Operators Related to Potentials in PT Quantum Mechanics

In the recent years a generalization $H=p^2 +x^2(ix)^\epsilon$ of the harmonic oscillator using a complex deformation was investigated, where \epsilon\ is a real parameter. Here, we will consider the most simple case: \epsilon even and x real. We will give a complete characterization of three different classes of operators associated with the differential expression H: The class of all self-adjoint (Hermitian) operators, the class of all PT symmetric operators and the class of all P-self-adjoint operators. Surprisingly, some of the PT symmetric operators associated to this expression have no resolvent set

Some Sobolev spaces as Pontryagin spaces

We show that well known Sobolev spaces can quite naturally be treated as Pontryagin spaces. This point of view gives a possibility to obtain new properties for some traditional objects such as simplest differential operators

Spectralizable operators

We introduce the notion of spectralizable operators. A closed operator A in a Hilbert space is called spectralizable if there exists a non-constant polynomial p such that the operator p(A) is a scalar spectral operator in the sense of Dunford. We show that such operators belongs to the class of generalized spectral operators and give some examples where spectralizable operators occur naturally

LUX -- A Laser-Plasma Driven Undulator Beamline

The LUX beamline is a novel type of laser-plasma accelerator. Building on the joint expertise of the University of Hamburg and DESY the beamline was carefully designed to combine state-of-the-art expertise in laser-plasma acceleration with the latest advances in accelerator technology and beam diagnostics. LUX introduces a paradigm change moving from single-shot demonstration experiments towards available, stable and controllable accelerator operation. Here, we discuss the general design concepts of LUX and present first critical milestones that have recently been achieved, including the generation of electron beams at the repetition rate of up to 5 Hz with energies above 600 MeV and the generation of spontaneous undulator radiation at a wavelength well below 9 nm.Comment: submitte

Local spectral theory for normal operators in Krein spaces

Sign type spectra are an important tool in the investigation of spectral properties of selfadjoint operators in Krein spaces. It is our aim to show that also sign type spectra for normal operators in Krein spaces provide insight in the spectral nature of the operator: If the real part and the imaginary part of a normal operator in a Krein space have real spectra only and if the growth of the resolvent of the imaginary part (close to the real axis) is of finite order, then the normal operator possesses a local spectral function defined for Borel subsets of the spectrum which belong to positive (negative) type spectrum. Moreover, the restriction of the normal operator to the spectral subspace corresponding to such a Borel subset is a normal operator in some Hilbert space. In particular, if the spectrum consists entirely out of positive and negative type spectrum, then the operator is similar to a normal operator in some Hilbert space.MSC 2000: 47B50 ; 47B1