Stress-specific activation of the chaperone Hsp33 requires the unfolding of a central linker region. This activation mechanism suggests an intriguing functional relationship between the chaperone's own partial unfolding and its ability to bind other partially folded client proteins. However, identifying where Hsp33 binds its clients has remained a major gap in our understanding of Hsp33's worki...

Dilated cardiomyopathy is a disease of left ventricular dysfunction accompanied by impairment of the β1-adrenergic receptor (β1-AR) signal cascade. The disturbed β1-AR function may be based on an elevated sympathetic tone observed in patients with heart failure. Prolonged adrenergic stimulation may induce metabolic and electrophysiological disturbances in the myocardium, resulting in tachyarrhy...

Since the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) was introduced by Dantzig and Ramser, it became one of the most studied problems in Combinatorial Optimization. Different solution approaches were proposed over the past decades to solve the VRP and its variants. In this thesis, we discuss about two VRP variants, resulting from the integration of VRPs with distribution problems. The first problem takes pl...

In order to improve docking score correction, we developed several structure-based quantitative structure activity relationship (QSAR) models by protein-drug docking simulations and applied these models to public affinity data. The prediction models used descriptor-based regression, and the compound descriptor was a set of docking scores against multiple (∼600) proteins including nontargets. Th...

Existing flexible docking approaches model the ligand and receptor flexibility either separately or in a loosely coupled manner, which captures the conformational changes inefficiently. Here, we propose a flexible docking approach, MedusaDock, which models both ligand and receptor flexibility simultaneously with sets of discrete rotamers. We developed an algorithm to build the ligand rotamer li...

Supply chains are going to evolve by a new technology, which is called the Electronic Product Code (EPC) technology, based on radio frequency identification (RFID). This provides new opportunities in automatic identification that none of previous technologies offered. It also appears to have the potential to enhance Efficient Consumer Response (ECR), which is a grocery industry supply chain man...