The goal of structure-based drug design is to create a ligand which binds with high affinity to a protein target. An exciting prospect is the ability to carry out this design process computationally and thereby obtain a series of drug leads which are potent and which can be subsequently optimized for druglike properties. In an earlier paper, we presented the wormhole method [1] which, subject t...

Sendai virus-mediated fusion between mitotic and interphase mammalian cells causes the rapid condensation of the interphase chromosomes into distinct structures, a process termed premature chromosome condensation. This phenomenon has been used to assess the immediate action of x-rays and ultraviolet light on the chromosomes of HeLa cells irradiated in the G1 phase of the life cycle. X-irradiati...

The surrogate light chain (SL) composed of the A-like and VpreB polypeptides is organized as two Ig domains and an extra-loop structure. It associates to the mu-chain in preB cells. We have produced human VpreB, SL, two Fdmu (VH-CH1), and the two corresponding Fab-like (Fdmu-SL) recombinant proteins in baculovirus. The correctness of the general conformation of the proteins was assessed by epit...

Although apoptotic cells are recognized and engulfed by macrophages via a number of membrane receptors, little is known about the fate of apoptotic cells after the engulfment. We observed in this study that nucleosomal DNA fragments of apoptotic cells disappeared when they were engulfed by the macrophage cell line J774.1 at 37 degrees C. Pretreatment of J774.1 cells with chloroquine inhibited i...

Current multimedia applications in Web 2.0 have generated large repositories for multimedia resources and annotations, so there is an urgent requirement to interlink annotations of these resources across different repositories to achieve better indexing and searching. To solve this problem, many researchers have been trying to apply semantic Web technologies to media fragments and annotations. ...

In two experiments, visual search was used to study the grouping of shape on the basis of perceptual closure among participants 5-23 years of age. We first showed that young children, like adults, demonstrate an efficient search for a concave target among convex distractors for closed connected stimuli but an inefficient search for open stimuli. Reliable developmental differences, however, were...

Unlike properly folded and assembled proteins, most misfolded and incompletely assembled proteins are retained in the endoplasmic reticulum of mammalian cells and degraded without transport to the Golgi complex. To analyze the mechanisms underlying this unique sorting process and its fidelity, the fate of C-terminally truncated fragments of influenza hemagglutinin was determined. An assortment ...