The flavor-singlet H dibaryon, which has strangeness -2 and baryon number 2, is studied by the approach recently developed for the baryon-baryon interactions in lattice QCD. The flavor-singlet central potential is derived from the spatial and imaginary-time dependence of the Nambu-Bethe-Salpeter wave function measured in N(f)=3 full QCD simulations with the lattice size of L≃2,3,4  fm. The potential is found to be insensitive to the volume, and it leads to a bound H dibaryon with the binding energy of 30-40 MeV for the pseudoscalar meson mass of 673-1015 MeV.

Prenylation plays a major role in the diversification of aromatic natural products, such as phenylpropanoids, flavonoids, and coumarins. This biosynthetic reaction represents the crucial coupling process of the shikimate or polyketide pathway providing an aromatic moiety and the isoprenoid pathway derived from the mevalonate or methyl erythritol phosphate (MEP) pathway, which provides the prenyl (isoprenoid) chain. In particular, prenylation contributes strongly to the diversification of flavonoids, due to differences in the prenylation position on the aromatic rings, various lengths of prenyl chain, and further modifications of the prenyl moiety, e.g., cyclization and hydroxylation, resulting in the occurrence of ca. 1000 prenylated flavonoids in plants. Many prenylated flavonoids have been identified as active components in medicinal plants with biological activities, such as anti-cancer, anti-androgen, anti-leishmania, and anti-nitric oxide production. Due to their beneficial effects on human health, prenylated flavonoids are of particular interest as lead compounds for producing drugs and functional foods. However, the gene coding for prenyltransferases that catalyze the key step of flavonoid prenylation have remained unidentified for more than three decades, because of the membrane-bound nature of these enzymes. Recently, we have succeeded in identifying the first prenyltransferase gene SfN8DT-1 from Sophora flavescens, which is responsible for the prenylation of the flavonoid naringenin at the 8-position, and is specific for flavanones and dimethylallyl diphosphate (DMAPP) as substrates. Phylogenetic analysis showed that SfN8DT-1 has the same evolutionary origin as prenyltransferases for vitamin E and plastoquinone. A prenyltransferase GmG4DT from soybean, which is involved in the formation of glyceollin, was also identified recently. This enzyme was specific for pterocarpan as its aromatic substrate, and (-)-glycinol was the native substrate yielding the direct precursor of glyceollin I. These enzymes are localized to plastids and the prenyl chain is derived from the MEP pathway. Further relevant genes involved in the prenylation of other types of polyphenol are expected to be cloned by utilizing the sequence information provided by the above studies.

Baryon-baryon potentials are obtained from 3-flavor QCD simulations with the lattice volume L ≃ 4 fm, the lattice spacing a ≃ 0.12 fm, and the pseudo-scalar-meson mass M ps = 469 -1171 MeV. The NN scattering phase-shifts and the mass of H-dibaryon in the flavor SU(3) limit are extracted from the resultant potentials by solving the Schrödinger equation. The NN phase-shifts in the SU(3) limit is shown to have qualitatively similar behavior as the experimental data. A bound H-dibaryon in the SU(3) limit is found to exist in the flavor-singlet J P = 0 + channel with the binding energy of about 26 MeV for the lightest quark mass M ps = 469 MeV. Effect of flavor SU(3) symmetry breaking on the H-dibaryon is estimated by solving the coupled-channel Schrödinger equation for ΛΛ-NΞ-ΣΣ with the physical baryon masses and the potential matrix obtained in the SU(3) limit: a resonant H-dibaryon is found between ΛΛ and NΞ thresholds in this treatment.

Imaginary-time Nambu-Bethe-Salpeter (NBS) wave function is introduced to extend our previous approach for hadron-hadron interactions on the lattice. Scattering states of hadrons with different energies encoded in the NBS wavefunction are utilized to extract non-local hadron-hadron potential. "The ground state saturation", which is commonly used in lattice QCD but is hard to be achieved for multi-baryons, is not required. We demonstrate that the present method works efficiently for the nucleon-nucleon interaction (the potential and the phase shift) in the 1 S 0 channel.

Prenylated flavonoids are natural compounds that often represent the active components in various medicinal plants and exhibit beneficial effects on human health. Prenylated flavonoids are hybrid products composed of a flavonoid core mainly attached to either 5-carbon (dimethylallyl) or 10-carbon (geranyl) prenyl groups derived from isoprenoid (terpenoid) metabolism, and the prenyl groups are crucial for their biological activity. Prenylation reactions in vivo are crucial coupling processes of two major metabolic pathways, the shikimate-acetate and isoprenoid pathways, in which these reactions are also known as a rate-limiting step. However, none of the genes responsible for the prenylation of flavonoids has been identified despite more than 30 years of research in this field. We have isolated a prenyltransferase gene from Sophora flavescens, SfN8DT-1, responsible for the prenylation of the flavonoid naringenin at the 8-position, which is specific for flavanones and dimethylallyl diphosphate as substrates. Phylogenetic analysis shows that SfN8DT-1 has the same evolutionary origin as prenyltransferases for vitamin E and plastoquinone. The gene expression of SfN8DT-1 is strictly limited to the root bark where prenylated flavonoids are solely accumulated in planta. The ectopic expression of SfN8DT-1 in Arabidopsis thaliana resulted in the formation of prenylated apigenin, quercetin, and kaempferol, as well as 8-prenylnaringenin. SfN8DT-1 represents the first flavonoid-specific prenyltransferase identified in plants and paves the way for the identification and characterization of further genes responsible for the production of this large and important class of secondary metabolites.The prenylation of aromatic compounds is a major contributor to the diversity of plant secondary metabolites due to differences in prenylation position on the aromatic ring, various lengths of prenyl chain, and further modifications of the prenyl moiety, e.g. cyclization and hydroxylation, resulting in the occurrence of more than 1,000 prenylated compounds in plants (Tahara and Ibrahim, 1995;Barron and Ibrahim, 1996). In particular, prenylated flavonoids in higher plants protect them by exhibiting strong antibacterial and antifungal activities (Sohn et al., 2004). Many prenylated flavonoids have been identified as active components in medicinal plants with biological activities, such as anticancer, anti-androgen, anti-leishmania, and anti-nitric oxide production (De Naeyer et al., 2004;Ahmed-Belkacem et al., 2005;Han et al., 2006). Due to the beneficial effects for human health, prenylated flavonoids are of particular interest as lead compounds for producing new drugs and functional foods. The prenylation of the flavonoid core increases the lipophilicity and the membrane permeability, which is one of the proposed reasons for the enhanced biological activities of prenylated flavonoids (Wang et al., 1997;Maitrejean et al., 2000;Murakami et al., 2000). However, none of the genes responsible for the prenylation reactions has been identified d...

The ΞΞ interaction in the 1 S 0 channel is studied to examine the convergence of the derivative expansion of the non-local HAL QCD potential at the next-to-next-to-leading order (N 2 LO). We find that (i) the leading order potential from the N 2 LO analysis gives the scattering phase shifts accurately at low energies, (ii) the full N 2 LO potential gives only small correction to the phase shifts even at higher energies below the inelastic threshold, and (iii) the potential determined from the wall quark source at the leading order analysis agrees with the one at the N 2 LO analysis except at short distances, and thus, it gives correct phase shifts at low energies. We also study the possible systematic uncertainties in the HAL QCD potential such as the inelastic state contaminations and the finite volume artifact for the potential and find that they are well under control for this particular system.

Glyceollins are soybean (Glycine max) phytoalexins possessing pterocarpanoid skeletons with cyclic ether decoration originating from a C5 prenyl moiety. Enzymes involved in glyceollin biosynthesis have been thoroughly characterized during the early era of modern plant biochemistry, and many genes encoding enzymes of isoflavonoid biosynthesis have been cloned, but some genes for later biosynthetic steps are still unidentified. In particular, the prenyltransferase responsible for the addition of the dimethylallyl chain to pterocarpan has drawn a large amount of attention from many researchers due to the crucial coupling process of the polyphenol core and isoprenoid moiety. This study narrowed down the candidate genes to three soybean expressed sequence tag sequences homologous to genes encoding homogentisate phytyltransferase of the tocopherol biosynthetic pathway and identified among them a cDNA encoding dimethylallyl diphosphate: (6aS, 11aS)-3,9,6a-trihydroxypterocarpan [(−)-glycinol] 4-dimethylallyltransferase (G4DT) yielding the direct precursor of glyceollin I. The full-length cDNA encoding a protein led by a plastid targeting signal sequence was isolated from young soybean seedlings, and the catalytic function of the gene product was verified using recombinant yeast microsomes. Expression of the G4DT gene was strongly up-regulated in 5 to 24 h after elicitation of phytoalexin biosynthesis in cultured soybean cells similarly to genes associated with isoflavonoid pathway. The prenyl part of glyceollin I was demonstrated to originate from the methylerythritol pathway by a tracer experiment using [1-13C]Glc and nuclear magnetic resonance measurement, which coincided with the presumed plastid localization of G4DT. The first identification of a pterocarpan-specific prenyltransferase provides new insights into plant secondary metabolism and in particular those reactions involved in the disease resistance mechanism of soybean as the penultimate gene of glyceollin biosynthesis.

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