Thermal radiation from C(N)+ and La@C(N)+.

The radiative cooling of positively charged fullerene and endohedral fullerene fragments of C60, C70, C84, and La@C82 has been measured in a time-of-flight mass spectrometer. The radiative cooling is measured via its influence on the metastable decay. The emissivity extracted from the data is between 4x10(-4) and 13x10(-4). These values agree fairly well with the emissivity calculated from considering the low-energy tail of the surface plasmon. No major difference is found in the emission behavior of empty and endohedral fullerenes.

Energy distributions in multiple photon absorption experiments.

Photofragmentation experiments on molecules and clusters often involve multiple photon absorption. The distributions of the absorbed number of photons are frequently approximated by Poisson distributions. For realistic laser beam profiles, this approximation fails seriously due to the spatial variation of the mean number of absorbed photons across the laser beam. We calculate the distribution of absorbed energy for various laser and molecular-beam parameters. For a Gaussian laser beam, the spatially averaged distributions have a power-law behavior for low energy with a cutoff at an energy which is proportional to fluence. The power varies between -1 for an almost parallel laser beam and -5/2 for a divergent beam (on the scale of the molecular beam). We show that the experimental abundance spectra of fullerenes and small carbon clusters can be used to reconstruct the distribution of internal energy in the excited C60 molecule prior to fragmentation and find good agreement with the calculated curves.

Translation across the 5'-splice site interferes with autocatalytic splicing.

The bacteriophage T4 nrdB gene, encoding the ribonucleotide reductase small subunit, contains a self-splicing group IA2 intron with an ochre codon in frame with the preceding exon sequence. The stop codon was changed to an amino acid codon and splicing efficiency was compared with that of the wild type in the presence and absence of translation. In vivo the mutant has a much lower efficiency for producing a mature transcript than the wild type. Also, the relative production of the full-length translation product is correspondingly lower in the mutant than in the wild type. These results confirm the importance of the stop codon, which spans the splice site of the nrdB intron. The occurrence of stop codons in 56 group I introns in protein-encoding genes was investigated. In 33 of those translation is terminated upstream of the first common elements of the catalytic core, of group I introns. In the rest translation is terminated in intron regions outside the heart of the catalytic core, with one exception. Our observations suggest that in situations where transcription and translation are coupled events there has been an evolutionary pressure to preserve stop codons in the 5'-region of these introns or to prevent translational termination from occurring in vital parts of the introns.