The in meso method for membrane protein crystallization uses a lipidic cubic phase as the hosting medium. The cubic phase provides a lipid bilayer into which the protein presumably reconstitutes and from which protein crystals nucleate and grow. The solutions used to spontaneously form the protein-enriched cubic phase often contain significant amounts of detergents that were employed initially ...

The salt-tolerance gene SOS3 (salt overly sensitive 3) of Arabidopsis thaliana encodes a calcium-binding protein that is able to sense the cytosolic calcium signal elicited by salt stress. SOS3 activates the SOS2 protein kinase, which activates various ion transporters. SOS3 was cloned into a plasmid and expressed in Escherichia coli, allowing purification of the protein to homogeneity. Two cry...

The fundamental understanding of crystallization, in terms microscopic kinetic and thermodynamic details, remains a key challenge the physical sciences. Here, by using situ graphene liquid cell transmission electron microscopy, we reveal atomistic mechanism NaCl crystallization from solutions confined within cells. We find that rock salt forms with peculiar hexagonal morphology. also see emerge...

An improved method, which is highly reproducible, was developed for the enantioseparation of racemic O-ethyl phenylphosphonothioic acid (1a) with brucine by introducing seeding to a supersaturated solution of the diastereomeric salt mixture. The present method gave both diastereomeric salts in high yields with a diastereomeric ratio of >99.5:0.5 upon choosing the crystallization solvent (MeOH f...

The osmotic virial coefficient B2 of globular protein solutions is calculated as a function of added salt concentration at fixed pH by computer simulations of the "primitive model." The salt and counterions as well as a discrete charge pattern on the protein surface are explicitly incorporated. For parameters roughly corresponding to lysozyme, we find that B2 first decreases with added salt con...

Protein aggregation is broadly important in diseases and in formulations of biological drugs. Here, we develop a theoretical model for reversible protein-protein aggregation in salt solutions. We treat proteins as hard spheres having square-well-energy binding sites, using Wertheim's thermodynamic perturbation theory. The necessary condition required for such modeling to be realistic is that pr...

Salt crystallization is a major cause of weathering of rocks, artworks and monuments. Damage can only occur if crystals continue to grow in confinement, i.e. within the pore space of these materials, thus generating mechanical stress. We report the direct measurement, at the microscale, of the force exerted by growing alkali halide salt crystals while visualizing their spontaneous nucleation an...