Extracellular electron transfer is the key metabolic trait that enables some bacteria to play a significant role in the biogeochemical cycling of metals and in bioelectrochemical devices such as microbial fuel cells. In Shewanella oneidensis MR-1, electrons generated in the cytoplasm by catabolic processes must cross the periplasmic space to reach terminal oxidoreductases found at the cell surface. Lack of knowledge on how these electrons flow across the periplasmic space is one of the unresolved issues related with extracellular electron transfer. Using NMR to probe protein-protein interactions, kinetic measurements of electron transfer and electrostatic calculations, we were able to identify protein partners and their docking sites, and determine the dissociation constants. The results showed that both STC (small tetrahaem cytochrome c) and FccA (flavocytochrome c) interact with their redox partners, CymA and MtrA, through a single haem, avoiding the establishment of stable redox complexes capable of spanning the periplasmic space. Furthermore, we verified that the most abundant periplasmic cytochromes STC, FccA and ScyA (monohaem cytochrome c5) do not interact with each other and this is likely to be the consequence of negative surface charges in these proteins. This reveals the co-existence of two non-mixing redox pathways that lead to extracellular electron transfer in S. oneidensis MR-1 established through transient protein interactions.

Bacteria of the genus Shewanella contain an abundant small tetraheme cytochrome in their periplasm when growing anaerobically. Data collected for the protein isolated from S. oneidensis MR-1 and S. frigidimarina indicate differences in the order of oxidation of the hemes. A detailed thermodynamic characterization of the cytochrome from S. oneidensis MR-1 in the physiological pH range was performed, with data collected in the pH range 5.5-9.0 from NMR experiments using partially oxidized samples and from redox titrations followed by visible spectroscopy. These data allow the parsing of the redox and redox-protonation interactions that occur during the titration of hemes. The results show that electrostatic effects dominate the heme-heme interactions, in agreement with modest redox-linked structural modifications, and protonation has a considerable influence on the redox properties of the hemes in the physiological pH range. Theoretical calculations using the oxidized and reduced structures of this protein reveal that the bulk redox-Bohr effect arises from the aggregate fractional titration of several of the heme propionates. This detailed characterization of the thermodynamic properties of the cytochrome shows that only a few of the multiple microscopic redox states that the protein can access are significantly populated at physiological pH. On this basis a functional pathway for the redox activity of the small tetraheme cytochrome from S. oneidensis MR-1 is proposed, where reduction and protonation are thermodynamically coupled in the physiological range. The differences between the small tetraheme cytochromes from the two organisms are discussed in the context of their biological role.

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In social networks such as Orkut, www.orkut.com, a large portion of the user queries refer to names of other people. Indeed, more than 50% of the queries in Orkut are about names of other users, with an average of 1.8 terms per query. Further, the users usually search for people with whom they maintain relationships in the network. These relationships can be modelled as edges in a friendship graph, a graph in which the nodes represent the users. In this context, search ranking can be modelled as a function that depends on the distances among users in the graph, more specifically, of shortest paths in the friendship graph. However, application of this idea to ranking is not straightforward because the large size of modern social networks (dozens of millions of users) prevents efficient computation of shortest paths at query time. We overcome this by designing a ranking formula that strikes a balance between producing good results and reducing query processing time. Using data from the Orkut social network, which includes over 40 million users, we show that our ranking, augmented by this new signal, produces high quality results, while maintaining query processing time small.