Metabolic highways may be orchestrated by the assembly of sequential enzymes into protein complexes, or metabolons, to facilitate efficient channeling of intermediates and to prevent undesired metabolic cross-talk while maintaining metabolic flexibility. Here we report the isolation of the dynamic metabolon that catalyzes the formation of the cyanogenic glucoside dhurrin, a defense compound produced in sorghum plants. The metabolon was reconstituted in liposomes, which demonstrated the importance of membrane surface charge and the presence of the glucosyltransferase for metabolic channeling. We used in planta fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy and fluorescence correlation spectroscopy to study functional and structural characteristics of the metabolon. Understanding the regulation of biosynthetic metabolons offers opportunities to optimize synthetic biology approaches for efficient production of high-value products in heterologous hosts.

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The aim of this paper is to achieve a model for prediction of cerebral palsy based on motion data of young infants. The prediction is formulated as a classification problem to assign each of the infants to one of the healthy or with cerebral palsy groups. Unlike formerly proposed features that are mostly defined in the time domain, this study proposes a set of features derived from frequency analysis of infants' motions. Since cerebral palsy affects the variability of the motions, and frequency analysis is an intuitive way of studying variability, suggested features are suitable and consistent with the nature of the condition. In the current application, a well-known problem, few subjects and many features, was initially encountered. In such a case, most classifiers get trapped in a suboptimal model and, consequently, fail to provide sufficient prediction accuracy. To solve this problem, a feature selection method that determines features with significant predictive ability is proposed. The feature selection method decreases the risk of false discovery and, therefore, the prediction model is more likely to be valid and generalizable for future use. A detailed study is performed on the proposed features and the feature selection method: the classification results confirm their applicability. Achieved sensitivity of 86%, specificity of 92% and accuracy of 91% are comparable with state-of-the-art clinical and expert-based methods for predicting cerebral palsy.

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