Penicillin's catalytic mechanism revealed by inelastic neutrons and quantum chemical theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Penicillin, travels through bodily fluids, targeting and acylatively inactivating enzymes responsible for cell-wall synthesis in gram-positive bacteria. Somehow, it avoids metabolic degradation remaining inactive en route. To resolve this ability to switch from a non-active, to a highly reactive form, we investigated the dynamic structure-activity relationship of penicillin by inelastic neutron spectroscopy, reaction kinetics, NMR and multi-scale theoretical modelling (QM/MM and post-HF ab initio). Results show that by a self-activating physiological pH-dependent two-step proton-mediated process, penicillin changes geometry to activate its irreversibly reactive acylation, facilitated by systemic intramolecular energy management and cooperative vibrations. This dynamic mechanism is confirmed by the first ever reported characterisation of an antibiotic by neutrons, achieved on the TOSCA instrument (ISIS facility, RAL, UK).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".