The identification of hot spots, a small subset of protein interfaces that accounts for the majority of binding free energy, is becoming more important for the research of drug design and cancer development. Based on our previous methods (APIS and KFC2), here we proposed a novel hot spot prediction method. For each hot spot residue, we firstly constructed a wide variety of 108 sequence, structu...

Proteins are under tight evolutionary constraints, so if a protein changes it can only do so in ways that do not compromise its function. In addition, the proteins in an organism evolve at different rates. Leveraging the history of patristic distance methods, a new method for analysing comparative protein evolution, called Mean Protein Evolutionary Distance (MeaPED), measures differential resis...

Point mutations within ras proto-oncogenes, particularly within the mutational hot-spot codons 12, 13 and 61, are frequently detected in human malignancies and in different types of experimentally-induced tumours in animals. So far little is known about ras mutations in naturally occurring canine fibrosarcomas or K-ras mutations in canine melanomas. To elucidate whether ras mutations exist in t...

It is known that binding free energy of protein-protein interaction is mainly contributed by hot spot (high energy) interface residues. Here, we investigate the characteristics of hot spots by examining inter-atomic sidechain-sidechain interactions using a dataset of 296 alanine-mutated interface residues. Results show that hot spots participate in strong and energetically favorable sidechain-s...

The thickness effect is the phenomenon that the fatigue strength of a welded connection decreases when the thickness of load carrying plate increases. The thickness effect is observed in details where the fatigue crack initiation takes place at the weld toe. The hot spot stress approach is a fatigue design approach based on the structural stress obtained from Finite element Analysis (FEA) resul...

Power transformers represent the largest portion of capital investment in transmission and distribution substations. In addition, power transformer outages have a considerable economic impact on the operation of an electrical network. One of the most important parameters’ governing a transformer’s life expectancy is the hot-spot temperature value. Due to under estimation of stray losses in powe...

Many thermonuclear X-ray bursts exhibit brightness oscillations. The brightness oscillations are thought to be due to the combined effects of non-uniform nuclear burning and rotation of the neutron star. The waveforms of the oscillations contain information about the size and number of burning regions. They also contain substantial information about the mass and radius of the star, and hence ab...

The fully three dimensional governing equations in the electron magnetohydrodynamic (EMHD) regime for a plasma with inhomogeneous density is obtained. These equations in the two dimensional ( 2-D) limit can be cast in terms of the evolution of two coupled scalar fields. The nonlinear simulations for the two dimensional case are carried out to understand the propagation of EMHD magnetic structur...

Background: In intracavitary brachytherapy for gynecological cancers, various techniques are used to locate the anterior rectal wall nearest to the sources but there is no consensus on the best method to do so. This study aimed to compare a technique used routinely in some centers that employs a wire marker to locate the position of the maximum rectal dose point, versus the method recommended b...

For decades, classical crossover studies and linkage disequilibrium (LD) analysis of genomic regions suggested that human meiotic crossovers may not be randomly distributed along chromosomes but are focused instead in "hot spots." Recent sperm typing studies provided data at very high resolution and accuracy that defined the physical limits of a number of hot spots. The data were also used to t...