Some industries require newer, more efficient recombinant enzymes to accelerate their ongoing biochemical reactions in harsh environments with less replenishment. Thus, the search for native enzymes from extremophiles that are suitable for use under industrial conditions is a permanent challenge for R & D departments. Here and toward such discoveries, two sequences homologous to amylopullulanas...

Round-leaf sundew (Drosera rotundifolia L.), family Droseraceae, genus Drosera, is one of a few plant species with a strong antifungal potential. Chitinases of carnivorous plants play an important role in decomposition of chitin-containing cell structures of insect prey. The cell wall of many phytopathogenic fungi also contains chitin, which can be utilized by chitinases, thus round-leaf sundew...

We synthesized fluorescent derivatives of sphingomyelin (N-acyl-sphingosylphosphocholine) and used them as substrates for several sphingomyelinases. The following five fluorescent probes, each attached to the terminal carbon atom of the fatty acyl residue, were introduced into sphingomyelin: dansyl, pyrene, carbazole, 4-chloro-7-nitrobenz-2-oxa-1,3-diazole, and anthroic acid. We compared the ra...

The effect of toluene solubilization on the size and mobility of Triton X100 (TX100) micelles and TX100/sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) mixed micelles was studied by turbidimetry, dynamic light scattering, and capillary electrophoresis. Micelle growth due to toluene solubilization was observed for both surfactant systems; however, two different modes of growth were seen. Mixed micelles in 0.1 M Na...

Allostery, i.e. the control of enzyme activity by a small molecule at a location distant from the enzyme's active site, represents a mechanism essential for sustaining life. The rational design of allostery is a non-trivial task but can be achieved by fusion of a sensory domain, which responds to environmental stimuli with a change in its structure. Hereby, the site of domain fusion is difficul...

Database systems tend to achieve only low IPC (instructions-per-cycle) efficiency on modern CPUs in compute-intensive application areas like decision support, OLAP and multimedia retrieval. This paper starts with an in-depth investigation to the reason why this happens, focusing on the TPC-H benchmark. Our analysis of various relational systems and MonetDB leads us to a new set of guidelines fo...

Immature calf testes were found to be an unusually rich source of follitropin (FSH) receptors. Particulate fractions derived from such testes bound 32% of added biologically active radiolabeled human FSH (12”I-labeled hFSH) and had a binding capacity of 52 x lo-l4 mol/mg of protein. These values are considerably higher than those previously reported for FSH receptors in other types of beef or m...

The deformation and fracture of the high strength steel which is used to fabricate grade X100 steel pipe were investigated at room temperature, on plate and pipe. Anisotropic behaviour was characterized by using tensile tests conducted along different directions. The fracture toughness of plate and pipe materials are compared using compact tension (CT) and Charpy V-notched tests. In both cases,...

Recently, interest in glycosyltransferases has increased due to the finding that differentiation and neoplastic transformation of cells may be accompanied by alterations in the composition and metabolism of cellular glycoconjugates. Previous studies using lactose as exogenous acceptor have shown apparent differences in the expression of the activities of fucosyland N-acetylneuraminyltransferase...

Membrane proteins play a large variety of functions in life and represent 30% of all genomes sequenced. Due to their hydrophobic nature, they are tightly bound to their biological membrane, and detergents are always required to extract and isolate them before identification by mass spectrometry (MS). The latter, however remains difficult. Peptide mass fingerprinting methods using techniques suc...