Curcumin is a bioactive compound from turmeric which has different biological properties and health benefits such as antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, and anticancer activities. However, the low solubility, poor bioavailability, and rapid degradation under neutral or alkaline pH conditions or when exposed to light, limit the food applications of curcumin. These problems can be solv...

The regulation of quantal size through pre- rather than postsynaptic mechanisms has recently received considerable attention as a potential mechanism for plasticity. Vesicular transporters catalyze the filling of synaptic vesicles with transmitter and are thus potential substrates for such presynaptic regulation. In this issue of Neuron, Prado et al. pursue this line of investigation and show t...

A major limitation of biopharmaceutical proteins is their fast clearance from circulation via kidney filtration, which strongly hampers efficacy both in animal studies and in human therapy. We have developed conformationally disordered polypeptide chains with expanded hydrodynamic volume comprising the small residues Pro, Ala and Ser (PAS). PAS sequences are hydrophilic, uncharged biological po...

Cardiothoracic Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland. Tom Treasure is responsible to the society for the collection and collation of these data and has a mandate from the society’s annual general meeting of its members to disseminate information based on the data. Contributors: AS, TT, and JvdM were responsible for study concept and design. TT and AS were responsible for acquisition of the data...

In reading through the various preprints, I was struck by the fact that many were concerned with specific computer implementations of one kind or another. Unfortunately, there seems to be little discussion of the program-ing from the programmer's viewpoint. This is under standable in a congress of computational linguistics but, I feel, somewhat regrettable. Especially nce the reports of what ha...

Linear regression analysis was performed ho study the correlation of in vitro carbamoylating activities, alkylating activities, and chemical half-lives with the biological activi lies of six chloroethylnitrosouneas in mice. The biological parameters included the dose resulting in the death of 10% of normal mice (LD,1), anhitumon activity for the L1210 leu kemia system , and myelotoxicity as exp...

Biological systems are far more complex than systems we design and build today. The human body alone has orders of magnitude more complexity than our most-intricate designed systems. Further, biological systems are decentralized in such a way that allows them to benefit from built-in error-correction, fault tolerance, and scalability. Despite added complexity, human beings are more resilient to...