It would be impossible in a scientific paper to document all the motivation, ideas, difficulties and indispensible helps behind the development of the Weissenberg camera. However, in this article some of this history will be discussed. The camera were available to users since 1987. In the spring of 1995 alone, 91 Japanese and 51 foreign teams had active proposals to use the cameras.
Recent progress in the structure determination and function investigation of light-harvesting antenna complex (LH) of photosynthetic bacteria has been reported for intramembrane complex, LH2 and LH1, from purple bacteria and chlorosomes from green bacteria. Both LH2 and LH1 consist of two concentric cylinders of helical protein subunits which enclose the pigment molecules. Bacteriochlorophyll a molecules sandwiched between the helices form a continuous overlapping ring. The structures of chlorosomes have been investigated by various spectroscopic methods and a model has been proposed based on the results of NMR measurement for bacteriochlorophyll c aggregates.
The proteasome is a unusually large multisubunit complex. It is an ATP-dependent protease responsible for selective degradation of target proteins ligated to ubiquitin as a degradation signal. Recently, the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway appears to play a vital role for G1/S and M progressions of cell cycle by regulating metabolic stability of cell cycle factors involved in both processes.
Amoeboid movement consists of several fundamental molecular processes in the cortical ectoplasm, such as pseudopod formation and tail retraction. Such processes occur in a local and coordinated manner in one amoeba. We show here that the microtubule system, which is localized in the endoplasm, is the structural basis for the coordination of the cell cortex. The microtubule system functions so that the individual processes can be related spatially and temporally with each other in several different ways, thus enabling a cell to walk randomly. Chemoattractants serve as information to yield one specific spitial arrangement suitable for migration toward the source.