Cloning and expression of first gene for biodegrading microcystins by Sphingopyxis sp. USTB-05

Harmful cyanobacterial blooms (HCBs) in natural waters are a growing environmental problem worldwide because microcystins (MCs) produced by cyanobacteria are potent hepatotoxins and tumor promoters. MCs are resistant against physical and chemical factors. Thus, biodegradation is the most efficient method for removing MCs, and a number of bacterial strains, especially genus _Sphingomonas_, have been isolated for biodegrading MCs. Although the pathway, enzyme, and gene for biodegrading MCs by _Sphingomonas sp._ have been widely identified recently, no gene concerned with the biodegradation of MCs has been successfully cloned and expressed. In this study, we show that the first and most important gene of mlrA, containing 1,008 bp nucleotides in length, in the biodegradation pathway of MCs by _Sphingopyxis sp._ USTB-05, which encodes an enzyme MlrA containing 336 amino acid residues, is firstly cloned and expressed in _E. coli_ DH5α, with a cloning vector of pGEM-T easy and an expression vector of pGEX-4T-1. The encoded and expressed enzyme MlrA is responsible for cleaving the target peptide bond between 3-amino-9-methoxy-2,6,8-trimethyl-10-phenyl-deca-4,6-dienoic acid (Adda) and Arg in the cyclic structure of microcystin-RR （MC-RR）and microcystin-LR（MC-LR), two typical and toxic types of MCs. Linear MC-RR and MC-LR are produced as the first products. These findings are important in constructing a new genetic bacterial strain for the efficient removal of MCs from the important water supplies and resolving the controversy on the biodegradation pathway of different types of MCs by genus _Sphingomonas_

Heavy quarkonium fragmentation functions from a heavy quark pair. II. PP wave

Recently, a new perturbative QCD factorization formalism for heavy quarkonium production at a large transverse momentum was proposed. Phenomenological application of this new approach relies on our knowledge of a large number of universal fragmentation functions (FFs) at an input factorization scale $\mu_0\gtrsim 2m_Q$ with heavy quark mass $m_Q$, which are nonperturbative, and in principle, should be extracted from data. With heavy quark mass $m_Q\gg \Lambda_{\rm QCD}$, we calculate these input FFs in terms of non-relativistic QCD (NRQCD) factorization. In a companion paper, we calculated these input FFs in NRQCD factorization approach including all contributions from $S$-wave NRQCD $Q\bar{Q}$-states. In this paper, we calculate contributions to the heavy quark-pair FFs from all $P$-wave NRQCD $Q\bar{Q}$-states.Comment: 38 pages, 3 figures, typos corrected, references added, version accepted by Journa

Matching issue in quasi parton distribution approach

In recent years, the quasi parton distribution has been introduced for extracting the parton distribution functions from lattice QCD simulations. The quasi and standard distribution share the same perturbative collinear singularity and the renormalized quasi distribution can be factorized into the standard distribution with a perturbative matching factor. The quasi parton distribution is known to have power-law UV divergences, which do not exist in the standard distribution. We discuss in this talk the nonperturbative renormalization scheme for the power divergence. We also demonstrate the perturbative matching of the quasi quark distribution between continuum and lattice at the one-loop.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, talk presented at the 34th annual International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2016), 24-30 July 2016, University of Southampton, U