Lyme disease is an infectious disease caused by a spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi ZS7. This spirochete is most often spread by ticks. Single antibiotic therapy is sufficient for containment of the early stage progression of the disease but combinational therapy is more preferred in later stages. Research is in progress for the development of drugs against the pathogen, but till date no vaccines...

The glyoxalase pathway, which consists of the two enzymes, GLYOXALASE 1 (GLX 1) (E.C.: 4.4.1.5) and 2 (E.C.3.1.2.6), has a vital role in chemical detoxification. In Arabidopsis thaliana there are at least four different isoforms of glyoxalase 2, two of which, GLX2-1 and GLX2-4 have not been characterized in detail. Here, the functional role of Arabidopsis thaliana GLX2-1 is investigated. Glx2-1...

BACKGROUND Activated androgen receptor binds to androgen-responsive elements (AREs) in genome to regulate target gene transcription and, consequently, mediates physiological or tumorigenic processes of the prostate. Our aim was to determine whether genetic variants in AREs are associated with clinical outcomes after androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT) in prostate cancer patients. PATIENTS AND ...

The quantification of fluid-structure interactions in arterial walls (from a biomechanical standpoint) requires a complete characterization of blood flow, shear stress in the interface between blood and endothelium, wall elasticity and wall stresses distribution. These interactions play an important role in pathogenic mechanisms of cardiovascular diseases, such as atherosclerosis and arterioscl...

The authors thank OpenEye Scientific Software Inc., ChemAxon, and Cepos Insilico Ltd. for providing Academic Licences for ROCS, JChem, and PARASURF, respectively. This work is funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, grant reference ANR-08-CEXC-017-01. VIPN is grateful for a Marie Curie IEF Fellowship. A) The target structures were first superposed onto the crystallographic query using P...

Many small-molecule drugs work by binding specifically to a target protein in the cell. It is known for over a century that both the ligand and protein receptor change their conformation in the association process, which is called the induced-fit effect. Ligand conformational change is routinely treated in methods for insilico drug discovery, because typical drug molecules have seldom more than...

'Conserved hypothetical' proteins pose a challenge not just for functional genomics, but also to biology in general. As long as there are hundreds of conserved proteins with unknown function in model organisms such as Escherichia coli, Bacillus subtilis or Saccharomyces cerevisiae, any discussion towards a 'complete' understanding of these biological systems will remain a wishful thinking. Insi...

Resistance genes are among the most important gene classes for plant breeding purposes being responsible for activation of plant defense mechanisms. Among them, the nucleotide binding site-leucine rich repeat (NBS-LRR) class R-genes are the most abundant and actively found in all types of plants. Insilico characterization of EST database resulted in the detection of 28 NBS types R-gene sequence...

Mycoplasma hominis is a urogenital bacterium which is pathogenic for humans. Lack of cell wall and high mutation rates have made M.hominis resistant to many of the available antibiotics. Novel drug target identification is indispensable for the development of new classes of drugs to make the existing treatments more efficient and to replace drug resistance. Identification of genes that are like...

In the last decades, biological databases became the major knowledge resource for researchers in the field of molecular biology. The distribution of information among these databases is one of the major problems. An overview about the subject area of data access and representation of protein and protein-protein interaction data within public biological databases is described. For a comprehensiv...