Discovery of archaeal fusexins homologous to eukaryotic HAP2/GCS1 gamete fusion proteins.

Sexual reproduction consists of genome reduction by meiosis and subsequent gamete fusion. The presence of genes homologous to eukaryotic meiotic genes in archaea and bacteria suggests that DNA repair mechanisms evolved towards meiotic recombination. However, fusogenic proteins resembling those found in gamete fusion in eukaryotes have so far not been found in prokaryotes. Here, we identify archaeal proteins that are homologs of fusexins, a superfamily of fusogens that mediate eukaryotic gamete and somatic cell fusion, as well as virus entry. The crystal structure of a trimeric archaeal fusexin (Fusexin1 or Fsx1) reveals an archetypical fusexin architecture with unique features such as a six-helix bundle and an additional globular domain. Ectopically expressed Fusexin1 can fuse mammalian cells, and this process involves the additional globular domain and a conserved fusion loop. Furthermore, archaeal fusexin genes are found within integrated mobile elements, suggesting potential roles in cell-cell fusion and gene exchange in archaea, as well as different scenarios for the evolutionary history of fusexins

3D-Beacons: decreasing the gap between protein sequences and structures through a federated network of protein structure data resources.

While scientists can often infer the biological function of proteins from their 3-dimensional quaternary structures, the gap between the number of known protein sequences and their experimentally determined structures keeps increasing. A potential solution to this problem is presented by ever more sophisticated computational protein modeling approaches. While often powerful on their own, most methods have strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, it benefits researchers to examine models from various model providers and perform comparative analysis to identify what models can best address their specific use cases. To make data from a large array of model providers more easily accessible to the broader scientific community, we established 3D-Beacons, a collaborative initiative to create a federated network with unified data access mechanisms. The 3D-Beacons Network allows researchers to collate coordinate files and metadata for experimentally determined and theoretical protein models from state-of-the-art and specialist model providers and also from the Protein Data Bank

Black rings in global anti-de Sitter space

© 2015, The Author(s). Abstract: We construct five dimensional black rings in global anti-de Sitter space using numerical methods. These rings satisfy the BPS bound |J| Hℓ| ≤ 1, indicating that they should be unstable under superradiance. At high temperatures, the limit |ΩHℓ| ↘ 1 is attained by thin rings with an arbitrarily large radius. However, at sufficiently low temperatures, this limit is saturated by a new kind of rings, whose outer circle can still be arbitrarily long while the hole in the middle does not grow proportionally. This gives rise to a membrane-like horizon geometry, which does not have an asymptotically flat counterpart. We find no evidence for thin AdS black rings whose transverse S2 is much larger than the radius of AdS, ℓ, and thus these solutions never fall into the hydrodynamic regime of the dual CFT. Thermodynamically, we find that AdS black rings never dominate the grand canonical ensemble. The behaviour of our solutions in the microcanonical ensemble approaches known perturbative results in the thin-ring limit