Even though natural products has an excellent record as a source for new drugs, the advent of ultrahigh-throughput screening and large-scale combinatorial synthetic methods, has caused a decline in the use of natural products research in the pharmaceutical industry. This is due to the efficiency in generating and screening a high number of synthetic combinatorial compounds; whereas traditional ...

Even though natural products has an excellent record as a source for new drugs, the advent of ultrahigh-throughput screening and large-scale combinatorial synthetic methods, has caused a decline in the use of natural products research in the pharmaceutical industry. This is due to the efficiency in generating and screening a high number of synthetic combinatorial compounds; whereas traditional ...

The physico-chemical properties of interaction interfaces have a crucial role in characterization of protein-protein interactions (PPI). In silico prediction of participating amino acids helps to identify interface residues for further experimental verification using mutational analysis, or inhibition studies by screening library of ligands against given protein. Given the unbound structure of ...

The identification of protein-protein interaction sites is essential for the mutant design and prediction of protein-protein networks. The interaction sites of residue units were predicted using support vector machines (SVM) and the profiles of sequentially/spatially neighboring residues, plus additional information. When only sequence information was used, prediction performance was highest us...

Glutaredoxins are key players in cellular redox homoeostasis and exert a variety of essential functions ranging from glutathione-dependent catalysis to iron metabolism. The exact structure-function relationships and mechanistic differences among glutaredoxins that are active or inactive in standard enzyme assays have so far remained elusive despite numerous kinetic and structural studies. Here,...

Before discovery of (pro)renin receptor, prorenin was regarded as a source of renin and probable diagnostic marker for diabetic nephropathy/Wilms' tumor. It is now considered that prorenin can perform renin activity by binding to (P)RR and binding mechanism of (pro)renin to (P)RR was indicated in many in vitro studies. Considering the physiological importance and pathological involvement of (P)...

Elongation growth in actinobacteria is localized at the cell poles. This is in contrast to many classical model organisms where insertion of new cell wall material is localized around the lateral site. We previously described a role of RodA from Corynebacterium glutamicum in apical cell growth and morphogenesis. Deletion of rodA had drastic effects on morphology and growth, likely a result from...

Retrospective symptom prevalence data, collected from over 2000 adult respondents living near three different hazardous waste sites, were analyzed with respect to both self-reported "environmental worry" and frequency of perceiving environmental (particularly petrochemical) odors. Significant positive relationships were observed between the prevalence of several symptoms (headache, nausea, eye ...

BACKGROUND Our previous work has provided strong evidence that the transcription factor SOX9 is completely needed for chondrogenic differentiation and cartilage formation acting as a "master switch" in this differentiation. Heterozygous mutations in SOX9 cause campomelic dysplasia, a severe skeletal dysmorphology syndrome in humans characterized by a generalized hypoplasia of endochondral bones...

Cinnamaldehyde is an important compound of the cinnamon essential oil, and it is responsible for the most of the health benefits of cinnamon. Enriching foods such as milk with cinnamaldehyde can lead to greater utilization of cinnamaldehyde properties. In this study, we investigated the interaction of cinnamaldehyde with bovine alpha-lactalbumin. Analyzing the spectrum of alpha-lactalbumin in t...