• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
• /
• v.34 no.6
• /
• pp.1656-1662
• /
• 2013

The ternary phase $EuZn_xIn_{4-x}$ has been identified as the main product of reactions of Eu, Zn, and In by using the In-flux method and characterized by both powder and single-crystal X-ray diffraction. The structure belongs to the common $BaAl_4$-type (tetragonal space group I4/mmm, Pearson code tI10) with lattice parameters of a = 4.5610(9) ${\AA}$, c = 12.049(3) ${\AA}$ for composition $EuZn_{1.10(12)}In_{2.90}$ and a = 4.5463(3) ${\AA}$, c = 12.028(2) ${\AA}$ for composition $EuZn_{1.18(2)}In_{2.82}$, respectively. In this structure, the Eu atoms are situated at the center of 18-vertex Fedorov polyhedra made of Zn and In atoms, where the 4d site is preferentially occupied by In and the 4e site is occupied by randomly mixed Zn and In atoms. Theoretical investigations using tight-binding linear muffintin orbital (TB-LMTO) method provide rationale for the observed site preferences and suggest potentially wider homogeneity range than the experimentally established for $EuZn_xIn_{4-x}$ ($x{\approx}1.1$).

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Applied Microbiology Conference
• /
• 2001.06a
• /
• pp.83-89
• /
• 2001

Recent advances in the structural and molecular biology uncovered that a set of translation factors resembles a tRNA shape and, in one case, even mimics a tRNA function for deciphering the genetic ：ode. Nature must have evolved this 'art' of molecular mimicry between protein and ribonucleic acid using different protein architectures to fulfill the requirement of a ribosome 'machine'. Termination of protein synthesis takes place on the ribosomes as a response to a stop, rather than a sense, codon in the 'decoding' site (A site). Translation termination requires two classes of polypeptide release factors (RFs)： a class-I factor, codon-specific RFs (RFI and RF2 in prokaryotes; eRFI in eukaryotes), and a class-IT factor, non-specific RFs (RF3 in prokaryotes; eRF3 in eukaryotes) that bind guanine nucleotides and stimulate class-I RF activity. The underlying mechanism for translation termination represents a long-standing coding problem of considerable interest since it entails protein-RNA recognition instead of the well-understood codon-anticodon pairing during the mRNA-tRNA interaction. Molecular mimicry between protein and nucleic acid is a novel concept in biology, proposed in 1995 from three crystallographic discoveries, one, on protein-RNA mimicry, and the other two, on protein-DNA mimicry. Nyborg, Clark and colleagues have first described this concept when they solved the crystal structure of elongation factor EF- Tu：GTP：aminoacyl-tRNA ternary complex and found its overall structural similarity with another elongation factor EF-G including the resemblance of part of EF-G to the anticodon stem of tRNA (Nissen et al. 1995). Protein mimicry of DNA has been shown in the crystal structure of the uracil-DNA glycosylase-uracil glycosylase inhibitor protein complex (Mol et al. 1995; Savva and Pear 1995) as well as in the NMR structure of transcription factor TBP-TA $F_{II}$ 230 complex (Liu et al. 1998). Consistent with this discovery, functional mimicry of a major autoantigenic epitope of the human insulin receptor by RNA has been suggested (Doudna et al. 1995) but its nature of mimic is. still largely unknown. The milestone of functional mimicry between protein and nucleic acid has been achieved by the discovery of 'peptide anticodon' that deciphers stop codons in mRNA (Ito et al. 2000). It is surprising that it took 4 decades since the discovery of the genetic code to figure out the basic mechanisms behind the deciphering of its 64 codons.