Heaven and Hell: visions for pervasive adaptation

With everyday objects becoming increasingly smart and the “info-sphere” being enriched with nano-sensors and networked to computationally-enabled devices and services, the way we interact with our environment has changed significantly, and will continue to change rapidly in the next few years. Being user-centric, novel systems will tune their behaviour to individuals, taking into account users’ personal characteristics and preferences. But having a pervasive adaptive environment that understands and supports us “behaving naturally” with all its tempting charm and usability, may also bring latent risks, as we seamlessly give up our privacy (and also personal control) to a pervasive world of business-oriented goals of which we simply may be unaware

The binding of haem and zinc in the 1.9 A X-ray structure of Escherichia coli bacterioferritin.

addresses: School of Biosciences, Henry Wellcome Building for Biocatalysis, University of Exeter, Stocker Road, Exeter, EX4 4QD, UK.types: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov'tThis a post-print, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Journal of Biological Inorganic Chemistry . Copyright © 2008 Springer Verlag / SBIC . The definitive version is available at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00775-008-0438-8The crystal structure of Escherichia coli bacterioferritin has been solved to 1.9 A, and shows the symmetrical binding of a haem molecule on the local twofold axis between subunits and a pair of metal atoms bound to each subunit at the ferroxidase centre. These metals have been identified as zinc by the analysis of the structure and X-ray data and confirmed by microfocused proton-induced X-ray emission experiments. For the first time the haem has been shown to be linked to both the internal and the external environments via a cluster of waters positioned above the haem molecule