In the past a good number of rotamer libraries have been published, which allow a deeper understanding of the conformational behavior of amino acid residues in proteins. Since the number of available high resolution X-ray protein structures has grown significantly over the last years, a more comprehensive analysis of the conformational behavior is possible today. In this paper, we present a met...

A water-soluble tripeptide Val-Ile-Ala (VIA) , bearing sequence identity with the C-terminal portion of the Alzheimer Abeta-peptide (Abeta(40-42)), self-assembles, in crystalline form, to produce an intermolecularly hydrogen bonded supramolecular beta-sheet structure which self-associates to form straight, unbranched nanofibrils exhibiting amyloid-like behavior; in contrast, the synthetic tripe...

In the past a good number of rotamer libraries have been published, which allow a deeper understanding of the conformational behavior of amino acid residues in proteins. Since the number of available high resolution X-ray protein structures has grown significantly over the last years, a more comprehensive analysis of the conformational behavior is possible today. In this paper, we present a met...

The cDNA-encoding sequences for yak metallothionein isoforms I (MT-I) and II (MT-II) were amplified and cloned by reverse-transcription PCR to characterize the nucleotide sequence and protein structure of metallothionein in the yak. The cDNA sequences of MT-I and MT-II were subjected to BLAST searching at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, and the results indicated that the nucl...

Tripeptide Tyr-Aaa-Gly (1a, 2b) is methionine-enkephalin analogues [Aaa = (R,S)-(1adamantyl)glycine]. The unique structure of adamantane is reflected in its highly unusual physical and chemical properties, which can have many applications including drug design and drug delivery. In this research, Quantum-mechanical calculations were performed at the HF/6-31G, HF/6-31G*, B3LYP/6-31G, B3LYP/6-31+...

The tripeptide amide glycyl-prolyl-glycinamide (GPG-amide) is a new antiretroviral drug candidate, but its absorption mechanism is unknown. In this investigation, the transport and metabolism of GPG-amide were studied in a model of the human intestinal epithelium, Caco-2 cell monolayers. The results show that when the tripeptide amide came into contact with the apical enterocyte membrane, it wa...

We report the discovery of conopressin-T, a novel bioactive peptide isolated from Conus tulipa venom. Conopressin-T belongs to the vasopressin-like peptide family and displays high sequence homology to the mammalian hormone oxytocin (OT) and to vasotocin, the endogenous vasopressin analogue found in teleost fish, the cone snail's prey. Conopressin-T was found to act as a selective antagonist at...

The two codon-specific eubacterial release factors (RF1: UAA/UAG and RF2: UAA/UGA) have specific tripeptide motifs (PXT/SPF) within an exposed recognition loop shown in recent structures to interact with stop codons during protein synthesis termination. The motifs have been inferred to be critical for codon specificity, but this study shows that they are insufficient to determine specificity al...

Alanine tripeptide is a good model molecule to analyze a conformational distribution of an unstructured peptide backbone, to study a competition between the intraand intermolecular hydrogen-bonding, as well as the favourable solvation conditions. In our work, we used three different spectroscopic techniques, the Raman and infrared (IR) spectroscopy, and the vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) ...