Potassium ion leakage impairs thermotolerance in Corynebacterium glutamicum.

Corynebacterium glutamicum, a gram-positive bacterium, can produce amino acids such as glutamic acid and lysine. The heat generated during cell growth and/or glutamate fermentation disturbs both the cell growth and fermentation. To overcome such a negative effect of the fermentation heat, we have tried to establish a high temperature fermentation. One of the approach is to create a thermotolerant strains, while the other is to create an optimum culture conditions able for the strain to grow at higher temperatures. In this study, we focused on the latter approach, where we examined the effect of potassium ion on cell growth at high growth temperatures of C. glutamicum. The supplementation of high concentrations of potassium chloride (300 mM) (or sorbitol, an osmolyte) mitigated the repressed cell growth induced by high temperature at 39 °C or 40 °C. The intracellular potassium concentration declines from 300 mM to ∼150 mM by increasing the growth temperature but not by supplementing potassium chloride or sorbitol. Furthermore, in vitro experiments revealed that the potassium ion leakage occurs at high temperatures, which was mitigated in the presence of high concentrations of extracellular potassium chloride. This suggested that the presence of high osmolyte in the culture medium could inhibit the potassium ion leakage induced by high temperature and subsequently support cell growth at high temperatures.

Quantitative performance assessments for neuromagnetic imaging systems.

We have developed a Monte-Carlo simulation method to assess the performance of neuromagnetic imaging systems using two kinds of performance metrics: A-prime metric and spatial resolution. We compute these performance metrics for virtual sensor systems having 80, 160, 320, and 640 sensors, and discuss how the system performance is improved, depending on the number of sensors. We also compute these metrics for existing whole-head MEG systems, MEGvision™ (Yokogawa Electric Corporation, Tokyo, Japan) that uses axial-gradiometer sensors, and TRIUX™ (Elekta Corporate, Stockholm, Sweden) that uses planar-gradiometer and magnetometer sensors. We discuss performance comparisons between these significantly different systems.