Karl Heinz Rechinger was born on October 16, 1906 at Vienna (Austria). He was the only son of Dr. Karl Rechinger and Rosa Elisabeth Rechinger née Favarger. His father was also a plant taxonomist. The principal focus of K.H. Rechinger was flora writing. He was the author of Flora Aegaea and founder and editor of "Flora Iranica". In 1929, Rechinger started to work as an unpaid volunteer in the De...

The intromission of the male’s long, flexible, threadlike phallus into the female’s similarly long, thin, S-shaped vagina in tephritid flies is mechanically challenging. The male of the Mediterranean fruit fly, Ceratitis capitata (Wiedemann, 1824), folds the basal portion of his phallus back on itself, inserts the folded portion into the female, and then gradually unfolds his phallus inside her...

BACKGROUND A versatile strategy for protein-surface coupling in biochips exploits the affinity for polyhistidine of the nitrilotriacetic acid (NTA) group loaded with Ni(II). Methods based on optical reflectivity measurements such as spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE) allow for label-free, non-invasive monitoring of molecule adsorption/desorption at surfaces. RESULTS This paper describes a SE stu...

Here we describe a generic procedure for the expression and purification of milligram quantities of functional recombinant eukaryotic integral membrane proteins, exemplified by hexahistidine-tagged bovine rhodopsin. These quantities were obtained with the recombinant baculovirus/Sf9 insect cell-based expression system in large-scale bioreactor cultures with the use of a serum-free and protein-f...

The crystal structure of a mutant form of the single-chain fragment (scFv), derived from the monoclonal anti-His tag antibody 3D5, in complex with a hexahistidine peptide has been determined at 2.7 A resolution. The peptide binds to a deep pocket formed at the interface of the variable domains of the light and the heavy chain, mainly through hydrophobic interaction to aromatic residues and hydr...

The cDNA of the human GM2-activator protein was cloned into the expression vector pHX17. The plasmid encodes a fusion protein with a hexahistidine tail and a Factor Xa cleavage site at its N-terminus. The recombinant protein was purified from cell homogenates under denaturing conditions by metal-ion affinity chromatography in a single step and then was refolded. The hexahistidine tail could be ...

We report oriented immobilization of proteins using the standard hexahistidine (His6)-Ni2+:NTA (nitrilotriacetic acid) methodology, which we systematically tuned to give control of surface coverage. Fluorescence microscopy and surface plasmon resonance measurements of self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of red fluorescent proteins (TagRFP) showed that binding strength increased by 1 order of magni...

The fungal pathogen Colletotrichum lindemuthianum secretes an endo-chitin de-N-acetylase (ClCDA) to modify exposed hyphal chitin during penetration and infection of plants. Although a significant amount of biochemical data is available on fungal chitin de-N-acetylases, no structural data exist. Here we describe the 1.8 A crystal structure of a ClCDA product complex and the analysis of the react...

The development of synthetic, low-molecular-weight ligand receptor systems for the selective control of biomolecular interactions remains a major challenge. Binding of oligohistidine peptides to chelators containing Ni2+-loaded nitrilotriacetic acid (NTA) moieties is one of the most widely used and best-characterised recognition systems. Recognition units containing multiple NTA moieties (multi...