Metabolic Engineering of Cofactor F420 Production in Mycobacterium smegmatis

Cofactor F420 is a unique electron carrier in a number of microorganisms including Archaea and Mycobacteria. It has been shown that F420 has a direct and important role in archaeal energy metabolism whereas the role of F420 in mycobacterial metabolism has only begun to be uncovered in the last few years. It has been suggested that cofactor F420 has a role in the pathogenesis of M. tuberculosis, the causative agent of tuberculosis. In the absence of a commercial source for F420, M. smegmatis has previously been used to provide this cofactor for studies of the F420-dependent proteins from mycobacterial species. Three proteins have been shown to be involved in the F420 biosynthesis in Mycobacteria and three other proteins have been demonstrated to be involved in F420 metabolism. Here we report the over-expression of all of these proteins in M. smegmatis and testing of their importance for F420 production. The results indicate that co–expression of the F420 biosynthetic proteins can give rise to a much higher F420 production level. This was achieved by designing and preparing a new T7 promoter–based co-expression shuttle vector. A combination of co–expression of the F420 biosynthetic proteins and fine-tuning of the culture media has enabled us to achieve F420 production levels of up to 10 times higher compared with the wild type M. smegmatis strain. The high levels of the F420 produced in this study provide a suitable source of this cofactor for studies of F420-dependent proteins from other microorganisms and for possible biotechnological applications

Search for narrow resonances and quantum black holes in inclusive and b-tagged dijet mass spectra from pp collisions at root s=7 TeV

A search for narrow resonances and quantum black holes is performed in inclusive and b-tagged dijet mass spectra measured with the CMS detector at the LHC. The data set corresponds to 5 fb(-1) of integrated luminosity collected in pp collisions at root s = 7 TeV. No narrow resonances or quantum black holes are observed. Model-independent upper limits at the 95% confidence level are obtained on the product of the cross section, branching fraction into dijets, and acceptance for three scenarios: decay into quark-quark, quark-gluon, and gluon-gluon pairs. Specific lower limits are set on the mass of string resonances (4.31 TeV), excited quarks (3.32 TeV), axigluons and colorons (3.36 TeV), scalar color-octet resonances (2.07 TeV), E-6 diquarks (3.75 TeV), and on the masses of W' (1.92 TeV) and Z' (1.47 TeV) bosons. The limits on the minimum mass of quantum black holes range from 4 to 5.3 TeV. In addition, b-quark tagging is applied to the two leading jets and upper limits are set on the production of narrow dijet resonances in a model-independent fashion as a function of the branching fraction to b-jet pairs

A 1.2 T canted cosθ dipole magnet using high-temperature superconducting CORC® wires

REBa2Cu3Ox (REBCO, RE = rare earth elements) coated conductors can carry high current in high background fields, in principle enabling dipole magnetic fields beyond 20 T. Although model accelerator magnets wound with single REBCO tapes have been successfully demonstrated, magnet technology based on high-current REBCO cables for high-field accelerator magnet applications has yet to be established. We developed a two-layer canted cosθ dipole magnet with an aperture of 70 mm using 30 m long commercial Conductor on Round Core (CORC®) wires. The 3.1 mm diameter CORC® wire contained 16 commercial REBCO tapes with a 30 μm thick substrate. The magnet was tested at 77 and 4.2 K. It generated a peak dipole field of 1.2 T with 4.8 kA at 4.2 K with neither thermal runaway nor training. Reasonable geometric field quality and strong magnetization-current effects with multipole decay were observed. Our work demonstrated a feasible high-temperature superconducting magnet technology as a first step toward a new accelerator magnet paradigm that will enable high-field inserts for next-generation circular colliders and stand-alone magnets that can operate over a wide temperature range for a broad range of applications