Autophagy requires ubiquitin-like Atg8 and Atg12 conjugation systems, where Atg7 has a critical role as the sole E1 enzyme. Although Atg7 recognizes two distinct E2s, Atg3 and Atg10, it is not understood how Atg7 correctly loads these E2s with their cognate ubiquitin-like proteins, Atg8 and Atg12. Here, we report the crystal structures of the N-terminal domain of Atg7 bound to Atg10 or Atg3 of thermotolerant yeast and plant homologs. The observed Atg7-Atg10 and Atg7-Atg3 interactions, which resemble each other but are quite distinct from the canonical E1-E2 interaction, makes Atg7 suitable for transferring Atg12 to Atg10 and Atg8 to Atg3 by a trans mechanism. Notably, in vitro experiments showed that Atg7 loads Atg3 and Atg10 with Atg8 and Atg12 in a nonspecific manner, which suggests that cognate conjugate formation in vivo is not an intrinsic quality of Atg7.
In this study, the effectiveness of an oscillating-body WEC with a tuned inerter (TI) proposed by the authors is shown through wave flume testing. The TI mechanism consisting of a tuning spring, a rotational inertial mass, and a viscous damping component is able to increase energy absorption capability by taking advantage of the resonance effect of the rotational mass. This mechanism has been recently introduced for civil structures subjected to external loadings such as earthquakes and winds to decay vibration response immediately. The authors applied this mechanism to oscillating-body WECs and showed that the proposed WEC increased the power generation performance and broadened the effective frequency range without increasing the mass of the buoy itself through numerical simulation studies. To verify the validity of the proposed WEC experimentally, a small-scale prototype of the proposed device is designed and wave flume testing is carried out with various regular wave inputs of different frequencies. The results show that the WEC with the properly adjusted TI mechanism demonstrates better power generation performance compared to the conventional WEC over a wide range of wave frequencies.
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