In recent years, the interest in studying nature inspired optimization algorithms for dynamic optimization problems (DOPs) has been increasing constantly due to its importance in real-world applications. Several techniques such as hyper-selection, change prediction, hypermutation and many more have been developed to address DOPs. Among these techniques, the hypermutation scheme has proved benef...

The ant colony optimization (ACO) metaheuristic is inspired by the foraging behaviour of real ant colonies. Similarly with other metaheuristics, ACO suffers from stagnation behaviour, where all ants construct the same solution from early stages. In result, the solution quality may be degraded because the population may get trapped on local optima. In this thesis, we propose a novel approach, ca...

In a simplified approach to the in vivo situation, where pathogenic fibrillar protein deposits are often found associated with cellular membranes, the aggregation kinetics of insulin in the presence of various model biomembranes were investigated using the Thioflavin T (ThT) fluorescence assay. The lipid dynamics near the gel-fluid transition, the chain length of saturated lipids and the presen...

Saposin C (Sap C) is known to stimulate the catalytic activity of the lysosomal enzyme glucosylceramidase (GCase) that facilitates the hydrolysis of glucosylceramide to ceramide and glucose. Both Sap C and acidic phospholipids are required for full activity of GCase. In order to better understand this interaction, mixed bilayer samples prepared from dioleoylphosphatidylglycerol (DOPG) and diole...

A new concept based on fluorescence lifetime correlation spectroscopy (FLCS) is presented allowing the simultaneous determination of diffusion coefficients of identical molecules located in different environments. The difference in fluorescence lifetimes, which is the main prerequisite for FLCS, is reached by locating one population of the dye close to a light-absorbing surface. Since such surf...