gestibility or protein quality of SBM, the urease assay is good for detecting underprocessing and the KOH protein solubility assay is good for detecting overprocessing. A combination of the latter two assays is needed to ensure that SBM has neither been underheated nor overheated. The protein dispersibility index (PDI) assay may be superior to the urease and KOH assays as an indicator of minimu...

Twinning is a major mechanism of plastic deformation in hexagonal close-packed (hcp) structures. However, mechanistic understanding twin nucleation and growth has yet to be established. This paper reviews the recent progress twinning hcp materials—particularly newly discovered phase transformation-mediated mechanisms—in terms crystallographical analysis, theoretical mechanics calculations, nume...

The advent of prolonged in-vitro preimplantation embryo culture using sequential culture media (Gardner et al., 1998) has permitted many IVF laboratories to successfully adopt blastocyst transfer. Unfortunately, an unexpected side effect of this success has seen a small but significant appearance of monozygotic twinning. This has now been described by several authors (Peramo et al. Curiously en...

Merohedral twinning is a crystal-growth disorder that seriously hinders the determination of macromolecular crystal structures by isomorphous replacement. The strategies used in the structures solved so far are discussed. Several methods can be used to determine the extent of twinning, the twin fraction and to detwin the data. Accurate determination of the twin fraction by analysing heavy-atom ...

A twinned crystal is an aggregate in which different domains are joined together according to a specific symmetry operation: the twin law. The diffraction patterns derived from different domains are rotated, reflected or inverted with respect to each other, depending on the nature of the relationship between the different domains, and weighted according to the quantity of a particular domain pr...

AIM OF THE STUDY Newborns from multiple pregnancies are increasing in number and demonstrate a higher perinatal morbidity and mortality compared to singletons. Prematurity is the main reason for most neonatal diseases in twins, but other variables may play a role and their prenatal evaluation may improve the overall outcome. MAIN FINDINGS Prematurity is six times more frequent in twins and th...

The structure of the antibody Fab fragment f3p4, which was selected from a subset of the synthetic HuCAL antibody library to bind the sodium citrate symporter CitS, is described at 1.92 A resolution. Comparison with computational models revealed deviations in a few framework positions and in the binding loops. The crystals belong to space group P2(1)2(1)2 and contain four molecules in the asymm...