Protein crystallization and structure determination at room temperature in the CrystalChip.

The production of high-quality crystals is a key step in crystallography in general, but control of crystallization conditions is even more crucial in serial crystallography, which requires sets of crystals homogeneous in size and diffraction properties. This protocol describes the implementation of a simple and user-friendly microfluidic device that allows both the production of crystals by the counter-diffusion method and their in situ analysis by serial crystallography. As an illustration, the whole procedure is used to determine the crystal structure of three proteins from data collected at room temperature at a synchrotron radiation source.

Improving grapevine virus diagnostics: Comparative analysis of three dsRNA enrichment methods for high-throughput sequencing.

The extraction of double stranded (ds) RNA is a common enrichment method for the study, characterization, and detection of RNA viruses. In addition to RNA viruses, viroids, and some DNA viruses, can also be detected from dsRNA enriched extracts which makes it an attractive method for detecting a wide range of viruses when coupled with HTS. Several dsRNA enrichment strategies have been developed.

On the Pelletier and Caventou (1817, 1818) papers on chlorophyll and beyond.

The first use of the word 'chlorophyll' (chlorophile or chlorophyle in the French original) appeared in two papers by Pierre-Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou, pharmacists in Paris who isolated and studied the green pigment from plants. Here, we provide English translations of their 1818 note and the slightly longer 1817 paper. Historical context is provided including a timeline of key discoveries in chlorophyll chemistry pertaining to photosynthesis.

Assembly of CpcL-phycobilisomes.

CpcL-phycobilisomes (CpcL-PBSs) are a reduced type of phycobilisome (PBS) found in several cyanobacteria. They lack the traditional PBS terminal energy emitters, but still show the characteristic red-shifted fluorescence at ~670 nm. We established a method of assembling in vitro a rod-membrane linker protein, CpcL, with phycocyanin, generating complexes with the red-shifted spectral features of CpcL-PBSs.

CTAB-GAN+: enhancing tabular data synthesis.

The usage of synthetic data is gaining momentum in part due to the unavailability of original data due to privacy and legal considerations and in part due to its utility as an augmentation to the authentic data. Generative adversarial networks (GANs), a paragon of generative models, initially for images and subsequently for tabular data, has contributed many of the state-of-the-art synthesizers. As GANs improve, the synthesized data increasingly resemble the real data risking to leak privacy.