Evaluation of ambipolar carrier mobility in alkyl-substituted phthalocyanine thin film

Yuki Nishikawa, Yuya Nakata, Shigehiro Ikehara, Akihiko Fujii, and Masanori Ozaki "Evaluation of ambipolar carrier mobility in alkyl-substituted phthalocyanine thin film," Journal of Photonics for Energy 8(3), 032214 (15 May 2018). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JPE.8.03221

Dynamic Assembly of Cascade Enzymes by the Shape Transformation of a DNA Scaffold

Within cells, the close spatial arrangement of cascade enzymes facilitates the channeling of intermediates and enhances cascade reaction efficiency. Reconfigurable DNA nanostructures, owing to their structural controllability and precise spatial addressability, are promising tools for mimicking such processes. In this study, a 3D DNA origami scaffold, with a dynamic shape transformation from its open boat form to a closed hexagonal prism induced by toehold-mediated strand displacement, is designed to investigate the enzyme cascade reaction of xylose reductase and xylitol dehydrogenase from D-xylose metabolic pathway. Enzymes are assembled on the DNA scaffold in its open state, which is subsequently closed by the assistance of DNA sequence-specific closing keys. The enzyme cascade efficiency is much higher in the static encapsulated closed state than in the open state due not only to the enzyme proximity but also the environmental factors of 3D DNA structure. These results provide novel insights into controlling enzyme cascade reactions by inducing the shape transformation of DNA nanostructures and how environmental factors affect the action of multi-enzyme complexes in the cell

Observation of band crossings protected by nonsymmorphic symmetry in the layered ternary telluride Ta3SiTe6

We have performed angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy of layered ternary telluride Ta3SiTe6 which is predicted to host nodal lines associated with nonsymmorphic crystal symmetry. We found that the energy bands in the valence-band region show Dirac-like dispersions which present a band degeneracy at the R point of the bulk orthorhombic Brillouin zone. This band degeneracy extends one-dimensionally along the whole SR high-symmetry line, forming the nodal lines protected by the glide mirror symmetry of the crystal. We also observed a small band splitting near EF which supports the existence of hourglass-type dispersions predicted by the calculation. The present results provide an excellent opportunity to investigate the interplay between exotic nodal fermions and nonsymmorphic crystal symmetry.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Coco-Nut: Corpus of Japanese Utterance and Voice Characteristics Description for Prompt-based Control

In text-to-speech, controlling voice characteristics is important in achieving various-purpose speech synthesis. Considering the success of text-conditioned generation, such as text-to-image, free-form text instruction should be useful for intuitive and complicated control of voice characteristics. A sufficiently large corpus of high-quality and diverse voice samples with corresponding free-form descriptions can advance such control research. However, neither an open corpus nor a scalable method is currently available. To this end, we develop Coco-Nut, a new corpus including diverse Japanese utterances, along with text transcriptions and free-form voice characteristics descriptions. Our methodology to construct this corpus consists of 1) automatic collection of voice-related audio data from the Internet, 2) quality assurance, and 3) manual annotation using crowdsourcing. Additionally, we benchmark our corpus on the prompt embedding model trained by contrastive speech-text learning.Comment: Submitted to ASRU202