Osmolytes are an integral part of living organism, e.g., the kidney uses sorbitol, trimethylglycine, taurine and myo-inositol to counter the deleterious effects of urea and salt. Therefore, knowing that the osmolytes' act either directly to the protein or mediated through water is of great importance. Our experimental and computational results show that protecting osmolytes, e.g., trimethylglyc...

Persister cells (persisters) are transiently tolerant to antibiotics and usually constitute a small part of bacterial populations. Persisters remain dormant but are able to re-grow after antibiotic treatment. In this study we found that the frequency of persisters correlated to the level of protein aggregates accumulated in E. coli stationary-phase cultures. When 3-(N-morpholino) propanesulfoni...

Nature has selected osmolytes to protect intracellular macromolecules against denaturing stress conditions. These molecules are accumulated in the intracellular environment at considerably high concentrations. In general, osmolytes are known to stabilize proteins. However, under certain conditions, their destabilizing properties have also been pointed out. A careful qualitative and quantitative...

The influence of hydroxyectoine on the properties of the aqueous solution in presence of DPPC lipid bilayers is studied via semi-isotropic constant pressure (NPT) Molecular Dynamics simulations. We investigate the solvent-co-solute behavior in terms of Kirkwood-Buff integrals as well as hydrogen bond life times for an increasing hydroxyectoine concentration up to 0.15mol/L. The observed prefere...

The halophilic methanogen Methanohalophilus portucalensis synthesizes three distinct zwitterions, (beta)-glutamine, N(sup(epsilon))-acetyl-(beta)-lysine (NA(beta)Lys), and glycine betaine, as osmolytes when it is grown at high concentrations of external NaCl. The selective distribution of these three species was determined by growing cells in the presence of osmolyte biosynthetic precursors. Gl...

Taurine has long been known as an osmolyte for intertidal invertebrates which regulate their volume during daily osmotic perturbations caused by the ebb and flood of the sea (Pierce 1982; Gilles 1987; Chamberlin and Strange 1989). However, comprehensive demonstration of taurine’s role as an osmolyte in the mammalian brain would wait until the experiments of Trachtman in 1988 and later Bedford, ...