Project description:The cellular protein quality control machinery with its central constituents of chaperones and proteases is vital to maintain protein homeostasis under physiological conditions and to protect against acute stress conditions. Imbalances in protein homeostasis also are keys to a plethora of genetic and acquired, often age-related, diseases as well as aging in general. At the EMBO Workshop, speakers covered all major aspects of cellular protein quality control, from basic mechanisms at the molecular, cellular, and organismal level to medical translation. In this report, the highlights of the meeting will be summarized.
Project description:The title triterpene, C(30)H(50)O(2), is an 18?-oleanane derivative prepared by the Wagner-Meerwein rearrangement of betulin with Bi(OTf)(3).xH(2)O (OTF is trifluoromethanesulfonate). There are two symmetry-independent mol-ecules in the asymmetric unit that show no significant differences concerning bond lengths and angles. The conformation of the six-membered rings is close to a chair form, while the five-membered epoxide rings adopt envelope conformations. All rings are trans-fused. In the crystal, mol-ecules are held together by O-H?O hydrogen bonds. A quantum-mechanical ab initio Roothan Hartree-Fock calculation on the isolated mol-ecule gives values for bond lengths and valency angles close to the experimental values. The calculations also reproduce well the mol-ecular conformation with calculated puckering parameters that match well the observed values.