Using peptides to achieve the functional and structural mimicry of small-molecules, especially those with biological activity or clear biotechnological applications, has great potential in overcoming difficulties associated with synthesis, or unfavorable physical properties. Combinatorial techniques like phage display can aid in the discovery of these peptides even if their mechanism of mimicry...

An efficient fusion expression system with a small fusion partner, His6-tagged N-terminal fragment of staphylococcal nuclease R, has been constructed and tested with two genes. The results show that the system is not only suitable for overexpression of small proteins and peptides but simplifies purification of target proteins and peptides. The study also provides a practical method for preparat...

Most inhibitors of Cyclin-dependent kinase 2 (CDK2) target its ATP-binding pocket. It is difficult, however, to use this pocket to design very specific inhibitors because this catalytic pocket is highly conserved in the protein family of CDKs. Here we report some short peptides targeting a noncatalytic pocket near the interface of the CDK2/Cyclin complex. Docking and molecular dynamics simulati...

RNA interference (RNAi) is an endogenous process in which small noncoding RNAs, including small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) and microRNAs (miRNAs), post-transcriptionally regulate gene expressions. In general, siRNA and miRNA/miRNA mimics are similar in nature and activity except their origin and specificity. Although both siRNAs and miRNAs have been extensively studied as novel therapeutics for ...

Yeast Mec1, the ortholog of human ATR, is the apical protein kinase that initiates the cell cycle checkpoint in response to DNA damage and replication stress. The basal activity of Mec1 kinase is activated by cell cycle phase-specific activators. Three distinct activators stimulate Mec1 kinase using an intrinsically disordered domain of the protein. These are the Ddc1 subunit of the 9-1-1 check...

Natively unstructured or disordered regions appear to be abundant in eukaryotic proteins. Many such regions have been found alongside small linear binding motifs. We report a Monte Carlo study that aims to elucidate the role of disordered regions adjacent to such binding motifs. The coarse-grained simulations show that small hydrophobic peptides without disordered flanks tend to aggregate under...

1. Though the occurrence of intestinal mucosal uptake of intact peptides, with cellular hydrolysis to amino acids, has been established, the importance of this mode of absorption in protein absorption is not known. This paper describes a comparison of the rates of intestinal absorption of pancreatic hydrolysates of four proteins with . those of the corresponding acid hydrolysates or amino acid ...

Identification of the coding elements in the genome is fundamental to interpret the development of living systems and species diversity. Small peptides (length < 100 amino acids) have played an important role in regulating the biological metabolism, but their identification has been limited by their size and abundance. Serum is the most important body fluid and is full of small peptides. In thi...

Protein–protein interaction (PPI) is one of the key regulatory features driving biomolecular processes and hence targeted for designing therapeutics against diseases. Small peptides are a new emerging class owing to their high specificity low toxicity. For achieving efficient targeting PPI, amino acid side chains often stapled together, resulting in rigidification these peptides. Exploring scop...