Contributions of Coulombic and Hofmeister Effects to the Osmotic Activation of <i>Escherichia coli</i> Transporter ProP
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Osmosensing transporters mediate osmolyte accumulation to forestall cellular dehydration as the extracellular osmolality increases. ProP is a bacterial osmolyte-H(+) symporter, a major facilitator superfamily member, and a paradigm for osmosensing. ProP activity is a sigmoid function of the osmolality. It is determined by the osmolality, not the magnitude or direction of the osmotic shift, in cells and salt-loaded proteoliposomes. The activation threshold varies directly with the proportion of anionic phospholipid in cells and proteoliposomes. The osmosensory mechanism was probed by varying the salt composition and concentration outside and inside proteoliposomes. Data analysis was based on the hypothesis that the fraction of maximal transporter activity at a particular luminal salt concentration reflects the proportion of ProP molecules in an active conformation. ProP attained the same activity at the same osmolality when diverse, membrane-impermeant salts were added to the external medium. Contributions of Coulombic and/or Hofmeister salt effects to ProP activation were examined by varying the luminal salt cation (K(+) and Na(+)) and anion (chloride, phosphate, and sulfate) composition and then systematically increasing the luminal salt concentration by increasing the external osmolality. ProP activity increased with the sixth power of the univalent cation concentration, independent of the type of anion. This indicates that salt activation of ProP is a Coulombic, cation effect resulting from salt cation accumulation and not site-specific cation binding. Possible origins of this Coulombic effect include folding or assembly of anionic cytoplasmic ProP domains, an increase in local membrane surface charge density, and/or the juxtaposition of anionic protein and membrane surfaces during activation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".