Selfish genes are DNA elements that increase their rate of genetic transmission at the expense of other genes in the genome and can therefore quickly spread within a population. It has been suggested that selfish elements could be exploited to modify the genome of entire populations for medical and ecological applications. Here we report that transcription activator-like effector nuclease (TALE...

Comparing protein structures in three dimensions is a computationally expensive process that makes a full scan of a protein against a library of known protein structures impractical. To reduce the cost, we can use an approximation of the three dimensional structure that allows protein comparison to be performed quickly to filter away dissimilar proteins. In this paper, we present a new algorith...

MOTIVATION We consider the problem of finding similarities in protein structure databases. Current techniques sequentially compare the given query protein to all of the proteins in the database to find similarities. Therefore, the cost of similarity queries increases linearly as the volume of the protein databases increase. As the sizes of experimentally determined and theoretically estimated p...

Treatment of acute burn wounds with silver sulfadiazine has raised concern of potential silver toxicity. As the wound heals, a barrier forms between the silver sulfadiazine and the blood, but this membrane is not impenetrable, and so silver absorption is still possible. In this work, we have modeled chemical systems to investigate the transport of silver sulfadiazine and silver chloride through...

Repair of DNA lesions through homologous recombination promotes the establishment of stable chromosomal interactions. Multiple helicases, topoisomerases and structure-selective endonucleases (SSEs) act upon recombining joint molecules (JMs) to disengage chromosomal connections and safeguard chromosome segregation. Recent studies on two conserved SSEs - MUS81 and Yen1/GEN1- uncovered multiple la...

The TOPS database holds topological descriptions of protein structures. These compact and highly abstract descriptions reduce the protein fold to a sequence of Secondary Structure Elements (SSEs) and three sets of pairwise relationships between them, hydrogen bonds relating parallel and anti- parallel beta strands, spatial adjacencies relating neighbouring SSEs, and the chiralities of selected ...

Hydrophobic-hydrophilic model (HP model) is one of the most simplified and popular protein folding models. This model considers the hydrophobichydrophobic interactions of protein structures, but the results of prediction are not encouraged enough. Therefore, we suggest that some other features should be considered, such as SSEs, charges, and disulfide bonds. In this paper we propose a genetic a...

We propose two methods for finding similarities in protein structure databases. Our techniques extract feature vectors on triplets of SSEs (Secondary Structure Elements) of proteins. These feature vectors are then indexed using a multidimensional index structure. Our first technique considers the problem of finding proteins similar to a given query protein in a protein dataset. This technique q...

Despite extensive research on health in working life, few studies focus on this issue from the perspective of managers in small-scale enterprises (SSEs). To gain deeper knowledge of managers’ perceptions and strategies for dealing with workplace health management, 13 Norwegian and Swedish SSE managers were interviewed after participating in a workplace health development project. The methodical...

In vitro assays are broadly used tools to evaluate the estrogenic activity in Waste Water Treatment Plant (WWTP) effluents and their receiving rivers. Since potencies of individual estrogens to induce in vitro and in vivo responses can differ it is not possible to directly evaluate risks based on in vitro measures of estrogenic activity. Estrone, 17beta-estradiol, 17alfa-ethinylestradiol and to...