Alternative final steps in berberine biosynthesis in Coptis japonica cell cultures

In Coptis japonica cell cultures an alternative pathway has been discovered which leads from (S)-tetrahydrocolumbamine via (S)-canadine to berberine. The two enzymes involved have been partially purified. (S)-Tetrahydrocolumbamine is stereospecifically transformed into (S)-canadine under formation of the methylenedioxy bridge in ring A. This new enzyme was named (S)-canadine synthase. (S)-Canadine in turn is stereospecifically dehydrogenated to berberine by an oxidase, (S)-canadine oxidase (COX), which was partially purified (25-fold). This enzyme has many physical properties in common with the already known (S)-tetrahydroprotoberberine oxidase from Berberis but grossly differs from the latter enzyme in its cofactor requirement (Fe) and its substrate specificity. Neither (S)-norreticuline nor (S)-scoulerine serves as substrate for the Coptis enzyme, while both substrates are readily oxidized by the Berberis enzyme. The four terminal enzymes catalyzing the pathway from (S)-reticuline to berberine are housed in Berberis as well as in Coptis in smooth vesicles with a density of =1.14 g/ml. These vesicles have been enriched and characterized by electron microscopy

S-adenosyl-l-methionine: (S) -7,8,13, 14-tetrahydroberberine--n-methyltransferase, a branch point enzyme in the biosynthesis of benzophenanthridine and protopine alkaloids.

The enzyme which transfers the CH3-group of S-adenosylmethionine to the nitrogen atom of (S)-tetrahydroberberine and (S)-stylopine is found to occur in a number of plant cell cultures originating from species containing alkaloids; it is located at an important branch point in isoquinoline alkaloid biosynthesis

Biosynthesis of the protoberberine alkaloid jatrorrhizine

Feeding experiments with distant single or doubly labelled precursors show that the methylene dioxy group of berberine is opened in the formation of jatrorrhizine

Enzymatic formation of protopines by a microsomal cytochrome P-450 system of Corydalis vaginans

A microsomal cytochrome P-450-NADPH dependent enzyme which hydroxylates stereo- and regiospecifically carbon atom 14 of (S)- -N- methyltetrahydroprotoberberines has been discovered in a number of plant cell cultures originating from species containing protopine alkaloids; the monooxygenase was solubilized, partially purified (100-fold) and characterized

Ionisation by quantised electromagnetic fields: The photoelectric effect

In this paper we explain the photoelectric effect in a variant of the standard model of non relativistic quantum electrodynamics, which is in some aspects more closely related to the physical picture, than the one studied in [BKZ]: Now we can apply our results to an electron with more than one bound state and to a larger class of electron-photon interactions. We will specify a situation, where ionisation probability in second order is a weighted sum of single photon terms. Furthermore we will see, that Einstein's equality $$E_{kin}=h\nu-\bigtriangleup E>0$$ for the maximal kinetic energy $E_{kin}$ of the electron, energy $h\nu$ of the photon and ionisation gap $\bigtriangleup E$ is the crucial condition for these single photon terms to be nonzero.Comment: 59 pages, LATEX2

AnAll Speed SecondOrder IMEXRelaxation Scheme for the Euler Equations

We present an implicit-explicit finite volume scheme for the Euler equations. We start from the non-dimensionalised Euler equations where we split the pressure in a slow and a fast acoustic part. We use a Suliciu type relaxation model which we split in an explicit part, solved using a Godunov-type scheme based on an approximate Riemann solver, and an implicit part where we solve an elliptic equation for the fast pressure. The relaxation source terms are treated projecting the solution on the equilibrium manifold. The proposed scheme is positivity preserving with respect to the density and internal energy and asymptotic preserving towards the incompressible Euler equations. For this first order scheme we give a second order extension which maintains the positivity property. We perform numerical experiments in 1D and 2D to show the applicability of the proposed splitting and give convergence results for the second order extension