Little is known about how the risk of disease varies across species and its consequences for host defenses, including the immune system. I obtained mean values of basal white blood cells (WBC) from 100 species of primates to quantify disease risk, based on the assumption that higher baseline WBC counts will be found in species that experience greater risk of acquiring infectious disease. These ...

We predict analytically that diagonal correlations of amino acid positions within protein sequences statistically enhance protein propensity for nonspecific binding. We use the term "promiscuity" to describe such nonspecific binding. Diagonal correlations represent statistically significant repeats of sequence patterns where amino acids of the same type are clustered together. The predicted eff...

Interactions between macromolecules in general, and between proteins in particular, are essential for any life process. Examples include transfer of information, inhibition or activation of function, molecular recognition as in the immune system, assembly of macromolecular structures and molecular machines, and more. Proteins interact with affinities ranging from millimolar to femtomolar and, b...

Abstract Motivation As experimental efforts are costly and time consuming, computational characterization of enzyme capabilities is an attractive alternative. We present evaluate several machine-learning models to predict which 983 distinct enzymes, as defined via the Enzyme Commission (EC) numbers, likely interact with a given query molecule. Our data consists enzyme-substrate interactions fro...

In social evolution theory, it has become common wisdom that close family ties should promote cooperative behaviour. Yet, in social insects, evidence is accumulating that queen promiscuity and low relatedness sometimes work better.