Papain-like cysteine peptidases are a diverse family of peptidases found in most known organisms. In eukaryotes, they are divided into multiple evolutionary groups, which can be clearly distinguished on the basis of the structural characteristics of the proenzymes. Most of them are endopeptidases; some, however, evolved into exopeptidases by obtaining additional structural elements that restric...

Although worm-like micelles have been studied for over 20 years, the diversity of macroscopic behavior and the potential analogy to polyelectrolytes has driven continued study. During the last year, development and application of more realistic scattering models has yielded a deeper understanding of micelle structure. Comprehensive studies on systematic systems are being reported that combine s...

For a compact monotonically normal space X we prove: (1) X has a dense set of points with a well-ordered neighborhood base (and so X is co-absolute with a compact orderable space); (2) each point of X has a well-ordered neighborhood πbase (answering a question of Arhangel’skii); (3) X is hereditarily paracompact iff X has countable tightness. In the process we introduce weak-tightness, a notion...

The frame-alignment monitoring procedures have been subject of extensive studies over the past decades, first to mention an excellent tutorial [1], together with the numerous theoretical analyses [2-6], with the last set of papers considering the time-variant channels [7-9]. When it seemed that nothing more could be contributed, a novel set of Recommendations for Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (...

Animal venom (e.g., scorpion) is a rich source of various protein and peptide toxins with diverse physio-/pharmaco-logical activities, which generally exert their action via target-specific modulation of different ion channel functions. Scorpion venoms are among the most widely-known source of peptidyl neurotoxins used for callipering different ion channels, such as; Na⁺, K⁺, Ca⁺, Cl(-), etc. A...

Protein aggregation is a process in which identical proteins self-associate into imperfectly ordered macroscopic entities. Such aggregates are generally classified as amorphous, lacking any long-range order, or highly ordered fibrils. Protein fibrils can be composed of native globular molecules, such as the hemoglobin molecules in sickle-cell fibrils, or can be reorganized beta-sheet-rich aggre...

It is well known that positrons can live long enough to form complexes with atoms. The theoretical study of these complexes is important to interpret experimental data from both positron scattering by atoms and molecules and positron annihilation spectroscopy. There are typically two different kinds of positron complexes. In one of them a positron attaches to a neutral or ionic atom or molecule...