We studied the specific labeling of streptavidin using the modular method for affinity labeling (MoAL) that we developed based on a catalytic amide-forming reaction using 2-chloro-4,6-dimethoxy-1,3,5-triazine (CDMT) and a tertiary amine catalyst. The primary structures of avidin and streptavidin are significantly different from each other, and streptavidin does not possess an acidic amino acid ...

Two viral proteins, HIV-1 protease and HIV-1 integrase, have been targeted for inhibitor design to prevent assembly and maturation of HIV-1 virions. The enzymatic mechanism of these proteins involves side-chain groups that serve as general acids or bases. Furthermore, catalytic activity requires that water be removed from the microenvironment surrounding the chemical reaction site or be constra...

Previously we revealed that the extra domain of SARS 3CLpro mediated the catalysis via different mechanisms. While the R298A mutation completely abolished the dimerization, thus resulting in the inactive catalytic machinery, N214A inactivated the enzyme by altering its dynamics without significantly perturbing its structure. Here we studied another mutant with S284-T285-I286 replaced by Ala (ST...

Title of dissertation: INFORMATION THEORETIC SECRET KEY GENERATION: STRUCTURED CODES AND TREE PACKING Sirin Nitinawarat, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Dissertation directed by: Professor Prakash Narayan Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Institute for Systems Research This dissertation deals with a multiterminal source model for secret key generation by multiple network terminals wi...

Packed columns are equipment commonly found in absorption, distillation, stripping, heat exchangers and other operations, like removal of dust, mist and odors and for other purposes. Mass transfer between phases is promoted by their intimate contact through all the extent of the packed bed. The main factors involving the design of packed columns are mechanics and equipment efficiency. Among the...

In this paper we study a variant of the bin packing problem in which the items to be packed are structured as the leaves of a tree. The problem is motivated by document organization and retrieval. We show that the problem is NP-hard and we give approximation algorithms for the general case and for the particular case in which all the items have the same size.

We study the hierarchically structured bin packing problem. In this problem, the items to be packed into bins are at the leaves of a tree. The objective of the packing is to minimize the total number of bins into which the descendants of an internal node are packed, summed over all internal nodes. We investigate an existing algorithm and make a correction to the analysis of its approximation ra...

This paper deals with the modeling of gas-liquid flow in distillation columns equipped with structured packing. The devices are seen as bi-structured porous media and a macro-scale model is proposed taking into account this specific geometry. In this model, the two liquid films, one-per-sheet, are treated separately and are allowed to exchange matter at the vicinity of the contact points betwee...