The Effect of Protease Inhibitors on Digestive Proteolytic Activity in the Raspberry Weevil, Aegorhinus superciliosus (Guérin) (Coleoptera: Curculionidae).

The raspberry weevil, Aegorhinus superciliosus (Guérin) (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), is an economically important pest of blueberry in southern Chile. The digestive protease activity of adult insects was investigated using general and specific substrates and inhibitors. Enzymatic assays demonstrated the presence of trypsin- and chymotrypsin-like serine proteinases. Furthermore, in vitro assays using phenylmethylsulfonyl fluoride (PMSF) and soybean trypsin inhibitor (SBTI) at 0.01 and 0.1 mM showed percentages of enzymatic inhibition between 0 and 16% for PMSF and 67 to 76% for SBTI, whereas in vivo assays indicated that SBTI caused between 50 and 90% mortality in males and between 80 and 100% in females. Our data indicate the presence of serine proteases and suggest that digestive proteases could be a target for the design and development of strategies to control the raspberry weevil.

Variable Lieb-Oxford bound satisfaction in a generalized gradient exchange-correlation functional.

We propose a different way to satisfy both gradient expansion limiting behavior and the Lieb-Oxford bound in a generalized gradient approximation exchange functional by extension of the Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof (PBE) form. Motivation includes early and recent exploration of modified values for the gradient expansion coefficient in the PBE exchange-correlation functional (cf. the PBEsol functional) and earlier experience with a numerical cutoff for large-s (s proportional to absolute value(vector differential n)/n(4/3)) in a version of the deMon molecular code. For either the original PBE or the PBEsol choice of the gradient coefficient, we find improved performance from using an s-dependent (spatially varying) satisfaction of the Lieb-Oxford bound which quenches to uniform electron gas behavior at large s. The mean absolute deviations (MADs) in atomization energies for a widely used test set of 20 small molecules are reduced by about 22% relative to PBE and PBEsol. For these small molecules, the bond length MADs are essentially unchanged.