Researchers in the Princeton University Department of Chemistry have discovered a new multi-step pathway through which bacteria found in the mammalian gut produce antimicrobial peptides.

The newly identified biosynthetic pathway transforms a biologically inert peptide into structurally complex antibiotics, which they call enteropeptins. Enteropeptins are a class of ribosomally synthesized peptide natural products, referred to as RiPPs.

The core structure of these products is synthesized by the ribosome, which is limited to the 20 canonical amino acids. The Mo Lab discovered and characterized new metalloenzymes capable of converting arginine, a canonical amino acid, into N-methylornithine, a noncanonical amino acid, within enteropeptin.

Art&science.

In “The Art of Memory”- a 1966 Non-fiction book by British historian, Frances Yates, she explained that artificial memory depended upon the recollection of images. Artificial memory was a kind of “inner writing” that the orator reviewed while presenting a speech, observing the places and their contents, the images, and recovering the memories for things (the subject matter) that those images represented.

Yates said: “ordinary things easily slip from the memory while the striking and the novel stay longer in the mind… e ought, then, to set up images that are not many or vague but active; if we assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we ornament some of them, as with crowns or purple cloaks, so that the similitude may be more distinct to us; or if we somehow disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint so that its form is more striking, or by assigning certain comic effects to our images, for that, too, will ensure our remembrance of them more readily. The things we easily remember when they are real we likewise remember without difficulty when they are figments.”

In this venture, we attempt to explore memory traces of the Hungarian born painter, photographer, educator, designer Gyorgy Kepes and reflect upon them, bend and transform the shape of things and gather insights beyond vision.