The title “Regents’ Professor” is the highest faculty honor awarded at Arizona State University. It is conferred on ASU faculty who have made pioneering contributions in their areas of expertise, who have achieved a sustained level of distinction, and who enjoy national and international recognition for these accomplishments. This collection contains primarily open access works by ASU Regents' Professors.

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Crystal structure determination of biological macromolecules using the novel technique of serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) is severely limited by the scarcity of X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) sources. However, recent and future upgrades render microfocus beamlines at synchrotron-radiation sources suitable for room-temperature serial crystallography data collection also. Owing to the longer

Crystal structure determination of biological macromolecules using the novel technique of serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) is severely limited by the scarcity of X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) sources. However, recent and future upgrades render microfocus beamlines at synchrotron-radiation sources suitable for room-temperature serial crystallography data collection also. Owing to the longer exposure times that are needed at synchrotrons, serial data collection is termed serial millisecond crystallography (SMX). As a result, the number of SMX experiments is growing rapidly, with a dozen experiments reported so far. Here, the first high-viscosity injector-based SMX experiments carried out at a US synchrotron source, the Advanced Photon Source (APS), are reported. Microcrystals (5–20 µm) of a wide variety of proteins, including lysozyme, thaumatin, phycocyanin, the human A[subscript 2A] adenosine receptor (A[subscript 2A]AR), the soluble fragment of the membrane lipoprotein Flpp3 and proteinase K, were screened. Crystals suspended in lipidic cubic phase (LCP) or a high-molecular-weight poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO; molecular weight 8 000 000) were delivered to the beam using a high-viscosity injector. In-house data-reduction (hit-finding) software developed at APS as well as the SFX data-reduction and analysis software suites Cheetah and CrystFEL enabled efficient on-site SMX data monitoring, reduction and processing. Complete data sets were collected for A[subscript 2A]AR, phycocyanin, Flpp3, proteinase K and lysozyme, and the structures of A[subscript 2A]AR, phycocyanin, proteinase K and lysozyme were determined at 3.2, 3.1, 2.65 and 2.05 Å resolution, respectively. The data demonstrate the feasibility of serial millisecond crystallography from 5–20 µm crystals using a high-viscosity injector at APS. The resolution of the crystal structures obtained in this study was dictated by the current flux density and crystal size, but upcoming developments in beamline optics and the planned APS-U upgrade will increase the intensity by two orders of magnitude. These developments will enable structure determination from smaller and/or weakly diffracting microcrystals.
ContributorsMartin Garcia, Jose Manuel (Author) / Conrad, Chelsie (Author) / Nelson, Garrett (Author) / Stander, Natasha (Author) / Zatsepin, Nadia (Author) / Zook, James (Author) / Zhu, Lan (Author) / Geiger, James (Author) / Chun, Eugene (Author) / Kissick, David (Author) / Hilgart, Mark C. (Author) / Ogata, Craig (Author) / Ishchenko, Andrii (Author) / Nagaratnam, Nirupa (Author) / Roy Chowdhury, Shatabdi (Author) / Coe, Jesse (Author) / Subramanian, Ganesh (Author) / Schaffer, Alexander (Author) / James, Daniel (Author) / Ketwala, Gihan (Author) / Venugopalan, Nagarajan (Author) / Xu, Shenglan (Author) / Corcoran, Stephen (Author) / Ferguson, Dale (Author) / Weierstall, Uwe (Author) / Spence, John (Author) / Cherezov, Vadim (Author) / Fromme, Petra (Author) / Fischetti, Robert F. (Author) / Liu, Wei (Author) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor) / School of Molecular Sciences (Contributor) / Biodesign Institute (Contributor) / Applied Structural Discovery (Contributor) / Department of Physics (Contributor)
Created2017-05-24
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Description
For many species, migration evolves to allow organisms to access better resources. However, the proximate factors that trigger these developmental changes, and how and why these vary across species, remain poorly understood. One prominent hypothesis is that poor-quality food promotes development of migratory phenotypes and this has been clearly shown

For many species, migration evolves to allow organisms to access better resources. However, the proximate factors that trigger these developmental changes, and how and why these vary across species, remain poorly understood. One prominent hypothesis is that poor-quality food promotes development of migratory phenotypes and this has been clearly shown for some polyphenic insects. In other animals, particularly long-distance bird migrants, it is clear that high-quality food is required to prepare animals for a successful migration. We tested the effect of diet quality on the flight behaviour and morphology of the Mongolian locust, Oedaleus asiaticus. Locusts reared at high population density and fed low-N grass (performance-enhancing for this species) had enhanced migratory morphology relative to locusts fed high-N grass. Furthermore, locusts fed synthetic diets with an optimal 1 : 2 protein : carbohydrate ratio flew for longer times than locusts fed diets with lower or higher protein : carbohydrate ratios. In contrast to the hypothesis that performance-degrading food should enhance migration, our results support the more nuanced hypothesis that high-quality diets promote development of migratory characteristics when migration is physiologically challenging.
ContributorsCease, Arianne (Author) / Harrison, Jon (Author) / Hao, Shuguang (Author) / Niren, Danielle (Author) / Zhang, Guangming (Author) / Kang, Le (Author) / Elser, James (Author) / Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor)
Created2017-06-07
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Description
The growth rate hypothesis predicts that organisms with higher maximum growth rates will also have higher body percent phosphorus (P) due to the increased demand for ribosomal RNA production needed to sustain rapid growth. However, this hypothesis was formulated for invertebrates growing at the same temperature. Within a biologically relevant

The growth rate hypothesis predicts that organisms with higher maximum growth rates will also have higher body percent phosphorus (P) due to the increased demand for ribosomal RNA production needed to sustain rapid growth. However, this hypothesis was formulated for invertebrates growing at the same temperature. Within a biologically relevant temperature range, increased temperatures can lead to more rapid growth, suggesting that organisms in warmer environments might also contain more P per gram of dry mass. However, since higher growth rates at higher temperature can be supported by more rapid protein synthesis per ribosome rather than increased ribosome investment, increasing temperature might not lead to a positive relationship between growth and percent P. We tested the growth rate hypothesis by examining two genera of Neotropical stream grazers, the leptophlebiid mayfly Thraulodes and the bufonid toad tadpole Rhinella. We measured the body percent P of field-collected Thraulodes as well as the stoichiometry of periphyton resources in six Panamanian streams over an elevational gradient spanning approximately 1,100 m and 7°C in mean annual temperature. We also measured Thraulodes growth rates using in situ growth chambers in two of these streams. Finally, we conducted temperature manipulation experiments with both Thraulodes and Rhinella at the highest and lowest elevation sites and measured differences in percent P and growth rates. Thraulodes body percent P increased with temperature across the six streams, and average specific growth rate was higher in the warmer lowland stream. In the temperature manipulation experiments, both taxa exhibited higher growth rate and body percent P in the lowland experiments regardless of experimental temperature, but growth rate and body percent P of individuals were not correlated. Although we found that Thraulodes from warmer streams grew more rapidly and had higher body percent P, our experimental results suggest that the growth rate hypothesis does not apply across temperatures. Instead, our results indicate that factors other than temperature drive variation in organismal percent P among sites.
ContributorsMoody, Eric (Author) / Rugenski, Amanda (Author) / Sabo, John (Author) / Turner, Benjamin L. (Author) / Elser, James (Author) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability (Contributor)
Created2017-04-18
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Description
Fire is one of the earliest and most common tools used by humans to modify the earth surface. Landscapes in the Yucatán Peninsula are composed of a mosaic of old growth subtropical forest, secondary vegetation, grasslands, and agricultural land that represent a well-documented example of anthropogenic intervention, much of which

Fire is one of the earliest and most common tools used by humans to modify the earth surface. Landscapes in the Yucatán Peninsula are composed of a mosaic of old growth subtropical forest, secondary vegetation, grasslands, and agricultural land that represent a well-documented example of anthropogenic intervention, much of which involves the use of fire. This research characterizes land use systems and land cover changes in the Yucatán during the 2000–2010 time period. We used an active fire remotely sensed data time series from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), in combination with forest loss, and anthrome map sources to (1) establish the association between fire and land use change in the region; and (2) explore links between the spatial and temporal patterns of fire and specific types of land use practices, including within- and between-anthromes variability. A spatial multinomial logit model was constructed using fire, landscape configuration, and a set of commonly used control variables to estimate forest persistence, non-forest persistence, and change. Cross-tabulations and descriptive statistics were used to explore the relationships between fire occurrence, location, and timing with respect to the geography of land use. We also compared fire frequencies within and between anthrome groups using a negative binomial model and Tukey pairwise comparisons. Results show that fire data broadly reproduce the geography and timing of anthropogenic land change. Findings indicate that fire and landscape configuration is useful in explaining forest change and non-forest persistence, especially in fragmented (mosaicked) landscapes. Absence of fire occurrence is related usefully to the persistence of spatially continuous core areas of older growth forest. Fire has a positive relationship with forest to non-forest change and a negative relationship with forest persistence. Fire is also a good indicator to distinguish between anthrome groups (e.g., croplands and villages). Our study suggests that active fire data series are a reasonable proxy for anthropogenic land persistence/change in the context of the Yucatán and are useful to differentiate quantitatively and qualitatively between and within anthromes.
Created2017-09-12
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Description

The membrane proximal region (MPR, residues 649–683) and transmembrane domain (TMD, residues 684–705) of the gp41 subunit of HIV-1’s envelope protein are highly conserved and are important in viral mucosal transmission, virus attachment and membrane fusion with target cells. Several structures of the trimeric membrane proximal external region (residues 662–683)

The membrane proximal region (MPR, residues 649–683) and transmembrane domain (TMD, residues 684–705) of the gp41 subunit of HIV-1’s envelope protein are highly conserved and are important in viral mucosal transmission, virus attachment and membrane fusion with target cells. Several structures of the trimeric membrane proximal external region (residues 662–683) of MPR have been reported at the atomic level; however, the atomic structure of the TMD still remains unknown. To elucidate the structure of both MPR and TMD, we expressed the region spanning both domains, MPR-TM (residues 649–705), in Escherichia coli as a fusion protein with maltose binding protein (MBP). MPR-TM was initially fused to the C-terminus of MBP via a 42 aa-long linker containing a TEV protease recognition site (MBP-linker-MPR-TM).

Biophysical characterization indicated that the purified MBP-linker-MPR-TM protein was a monodisperse and stable candidate for crystallization. However, crystals of the MBP-linker-MPR-TM protein could not be obtained in extensive crystallization screens. It is possible that the 42 residue-long linker between MBP and MPR-TM was interfering with crystal formation. To test this hypothesis, the 42 residue-long linker was replaced with three alanine residues. The fusion protein, MBP-AAA-MPR-TM, was similarly purified and characterized. Significantly, both the MBP-linker-MPR-TM and MBP-AAA-MPR-TM proteins strongly interacted with broadly neutralizing monoclonal antibodies 2F5 and 4E10. With epitopes accessible to the broadly neutralizing antibodies, these MBP/MPR-TM recombinant proteins may be in immunologically relevant conformations that mimic a pre-hairpin intermediate of gp41.

ContributorsGong, Zhen (Author) / Martin Garcia, Jose Manuel (Author) / Daskalova, Sasha (Author) / Craciunescu, Felicia (Author) / Song, Lusheng (Author) / Dorner, Katerina (Author) / Hansen, Debra (Author) / Yang, Jay-How (Author) / LaBaer, Joshua (Author) / Hogue, Brenda (Author) / Mor, Tsafrir (Author) / Fromme, Petra (Author) / Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry (Contributor) / Biodesign Institute (Contributor) / Applied Structural Discovery (Contributor) / Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology (Contributor) / Innovations in Medicine (Contributor) / Personalized Diagnostics (Contributor) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor)
Created2015-08-21
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Description
Nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) are important limiting nutrients for plant production and consumer performance in a variety of ecosystems. As a result, the N:P stoichiometry of herbivores has received increased attention in ecology. However, the mechanisms by which herbivores maintain N:P stoichiometric homeostasis are poorly understood. Here, using a

Nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) are important limiting nutrients for plant production and consumer performance in a variety of ecosystems. As a result, the N:P stoichiometry of herbivores has received increased attention in ecology. However, the mechanisms by which herbivores maintain N:P stoichiometric homeostasis are poorly understood. Here, using a field manipulation experiment we show that the grasshopper Oedaleus asiaticus maintains strong N:P stoichiometric homeostasis regardless of whether grasshoppers were reared at low or high density. Grasshoppers maintained homeostasis by increasing P excretion when eating plants with higher P contents. However, while grasshoppers also maintained constant body N contents, we found no changes in N excretion in response to changing plant N content over the range measured. These results suggest that O. asiaticus maintains P homeostasis primarily by changing P absorption and excretion rates, but that other mechanisms may be more important for regulating N homeostasis. Our findings improve our understanding of consumer-driven P recycling and may help in understanding the factors affecting plant-herbivore interactions and ecosystem processes in grasslands.
ContributorsZhang, Zijia (Author) / Elser, James (Author) / Cease, Arianne (Author) / Zhang, Ximei (Author) / Yu, Qiang (Author) / Han, Xingguo (Author) / Zhang, Guangming (Author) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor)
Created2014-08-04
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Description
The growth rate hypothesis (GRH) proposes that higher growth rate (the rate of change in biomass per unit biomass, μ) is associated with higher P concentration and lower C∶P and N∶P ratios. However, the applicability of the GRH to vascular plants is not well-studied and few studies have been done

The growth rate hypothesis (GRH) proposes that higher growth rate (the rate of change in biomass per unit biomass, μ) is associated with higher P concentration and lower C∶P and N∶P ratios. However, the applicability of the GRH to vascular plants is not well-studied and few studies have been done on belowground biomass. Here we showed that, for aboveground, belowground and total biomass of three study species, μ was positively correlated with N∶C under N limitation and positively correlated with P∶C under P limitation. However, the N∶P ratio was a unimodal function of μ, increasing for small values of μ, reaching a maximum, and then decreasing. The range of variations in μ was positively correlated with variation in C∶N∶P stoichiometry. Furthermore, μ and C∶N∶P ranges for aboveground biomass were negatively correlated with those for belowground. Our results confirm the well-known association of growth rate with tissue concentration of the limiting nutrient and provide empirical support for recent theoretical formulations.
ContributorsYu, Qiang (Author) / Wu, Honghui (Author) / He, Nianpeng (Author) / Lu, Xiaotao (Author) / Wang, Zhiping (Author) / Elser, James (Author) / Wu, Jianguo (Author) / Han, Xingguo (Author) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor)
Created2012-03-13
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Description
Evolving Earth observation and change detection techniques enable the automatic identification of Land Use and Land Cover Change (LULCC) over a large extent from massive amounts of remote sensing data. It at the same time poses a major challenge in effective organization, representation and modeling of such information. This study

Evolving Earth observation and change detection techniques enable the automatic identification of Land Use and Land Cover Change (LULCC) over a large extent from massive amounts of remote sensing data. It at the same time poses a major challenge in effective organization, representation and modeling of such information. This study proposes and implements an integrated computational framework to support the modeling, semantic and spatial reasoning of change information with regard to space, time and topology. We first proposed a conceptual model to formally represent the spatiotemporal variation of change data, which is essential knowledge to support various environmental and social studies, such as deforestation and urbanization studies. Then, a spatial ontology was created to encode these semantic spatiotemporal data in a machine-understandable format. Based on the knowledge defined in the ontology and related reasoning rules, a semantic platform was developed to support the semantic query and change trajectory reasoning of areas with LULCC. This semantic platform is innovative, as it integrates semantic and spatial reasoning into a coherent computational and operational software framework to support automated semantic analysis of time series data that can go beyond LULC datasets. In addition, this system scales well as the amount of data increases, validated by a number of experimental results. This work contributes significantly to both the geospatial Semantic Web and GIScience communities in terms of the establishment of the (web-based) semantic platform for collaborative question answering and decision-making.
Created2016-10-25
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Description
Mix-and-inject serial crystallography (MISC) is a technique designed to image enzyme catalyzed reactions in which small protein crystals are mixed with a substrate just prior to being probed by an X-ray pulse. This approach offers several advantages over flow cell studies. It provides (i) room temperature structures at near atomic

Mix-and-inject serial crystallography (MISC) is a technique designed to image enzyme catalyzed reactions in which small protein crystals are mixed with a substrate just prior to being probed by an X-ray pulse. This approach offers several advantages over flow cell studies. It provides (i) room temperature structures at near atomic resolution, (ii) time resolution ranging from microseconds to seconds, and (iii) convenient reaction initiation. It outruns radiation damage by using femtosecond X-ray pulses allowing damage and chemistry to be separated. Here, we demonstrate that MISC is feasible at an X-ray free electron laser by studying the reaction of M. tuberculosis ß-lactamase microcrystals with ceftriaxone antibiotic solution. Electron density maps of the apo-ß-lactamase and of the ceftriaxone bound form were obtained at 2.8 Å and 2.4 Å resolution, respectively. These results pave the way to study cyclic and non-cyclic reactions and represent a new field of time-resolved structural dynamics for numerous substrate-triggered biological reactions.
ContributorsKupitz, Christopher (Author) / Olmos, Jose L. (Author) / Holl, Mark (Author) / Tremblay, Lee (Author) / Pande, Kanupriya (Author) / Pandey, Suraj (Author) / Oberthur, Dominik (Author) / Hunter, Mark (Author) / Liang, Mengning (Author) / Aquila, Andrew (Author) / Tenboer, Jason (Author) / Calvey, George (Author) / Katz, Andrea (Author) / Chen, Yujie (Author) / Wiedorn, Max O. (Author) / Knoska, Juraj (Author) / Meents, Alke (Author) / Majriani, Valerio (Author) / Norwood, Tyler (Author) / Poudyal, Ishwor (Author) / Grant, Thomas (Author) / Miller, Mitchell D. (Author) / Xu, Weijun (Author) / Tolstikova, Aleksandra (Author) / Morgan, Andrew (Author) / Metz, Markus (Author) / Martin Garcia, Jose Manuel (Author) / Zook, James (Author) / Roy Chowdhury, Shatabdi (Author) / Coe, Jesse (Author) / Nagaratnam, Nirupa (Author) / Meza-Aguilar, Domingo (Author) / Fromme, Raimund (Author) / Basu, Shibom (Author) / Frank, Matthias (Author) / White, Thomas (Author) / Barty, Anton (Author) / Bajt, Sasa (Author) / Yefanov, Oleksandr (Author) / Chapman, Henry N. (Author) / Zatsepin, Nadia (Author) / Nelson, Garrett (Author) / Weierstall, Uwe (Author) / Spence, John (Author) / Schwander, Peter (Author) / Pollack, Lois (Author) / Fromme, Petra (Author) / Ourmazd, Abbas (Author) / Phillips, George N. (Author) / Schmidt, Marius (Author) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor) / Department of Physics (Contributor) / School of Molecular Sciences (Contributor) / Biodesign Institute (Contributor) / Applied Structural Discovery (Contributor)
Created2016-12-15
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Description
Preserving a system’s viability in the presence of diversity erosion is critical if the goal is to sustainably support biodiversity. Reduction in population heterogeneity, whether inter- or intraspecies, may increase population fragility, either decreasing its ability to adapt effectively to environmental changes or facilitating the survival and success of ordinarily

Preserving a system’s viability in the presence of diversity erosion is critical if the goal is to sustainably support biodiversity. Reduction in population heterogeneity, whether inter- or intraspecies, may increase population fragility, either decreasing its ability to adapt effectively to environmental changes or facilitating the survival and success of ordinarily rare phenotypes. The latter may result in over-representation of individuals who may participate in resource utilization patterns that can lead to over-exploitation, exhaustion, and, ultimately, collapse of both the resource and the population that depends on it. Here, we aim to identify regimes that can signal whether a consumer–resource system is capable of supporting viable degrees of heterogeneity. The framework used here is an expansion of a previously introduced consumer–resource type system of a population of individuals classified by their resource consumption. Application of the Reduction Theorem to the system enables us to evaluate the health of the system through tracking both the mean value of the parameter of resource (over)consumption, and the population variance, as both change over time. The article concludes with a discussion that highlights applicability of the proposed system to investigation of systems that are affected by particularly devastating overly adapted populations, namely cancerous cells. Potential intervention approaches for system management are discussed in the context of cancer therapies.
Created2015-02-01