From a nanoscience perspective, cellular processes and their reduced in vitro imitations provide extraordinary examples for highly robust few or single molecule reaction pathways. A prime example are biochemical reactions involving DNA molecules, and the coupling of these reactions to the physical conformations of DNA. In this review, we summarise recent results on the following phenomena: We i...

A new theory that naturalizes biological function is explained and compared with earlier etiological and causal role theories. Etiological (or selected effects) theories explain functions from how they are caused over their evolutionary history. Causal role theories analyze how functional mechanisms serve the current capacities of their containing system. The new proposal unifies the key notion...

with the history of cardiac surgery, there may be difficulty in finding the reference to a particular point. Usually, however, the major points are indexed and it is only ones ancillary to cardiac surgery that one must search for. The margins are liberally sprinkled with line drawings of many of the pioneers. The sketches add charm to the presentation, even though they are not always good liken...

Sulfation confers negative charge on glycolipids and the attached sulfate group presents a part of determinants for the molecular interactions. Mammalian sulfoglycolipids are comprised of two major members, sulfatide (SO3-3Gal-ceramide) and seminolipid (SO3-3Gal-alkylacylglycerol). Sulfatide is abundant in the myelin sheath and seminolipid is unique to the spermatogenic cells. The carbohydrate ...

Using a range of atomic force microscope techniques we have explored biological function across a broad range of systems and length scales. To this end we have utilized imaging, force-extension curves, indentation, and in some cases, AFM combined with fluorescence microscopy. Our measurements have included model systems investigated at the submolecular level, for example, to understand interact...

Introduction Thymidine kinase (TK) is an enzyme of the salvage pathway of nucleotide biosynthesis. There are only a few organisms (yeast being one of them) that do not have at least one enzyme of this specificity. Also most DNA viruses, from bacteriophages to human pathogenic viruses such as herpes and vaccinia, code for TKs [l]. Some of these viral TKs are of special interest; they are useful ...

There is a growing body of evidence implicating free radicals in a wide variety of medical diseases and conditions, especially the diseases of ageing, such as cancer and cardiovascular disease, which appear to be ultimate expressions of long-term, cumulative and sustained cellular damage. Vitamin E is an excellent lipid-soluble, chain-breaking antioxidant in the presence of other co-operative a...

Metabolite profiling is a fast growing technology and is useful for phenotyping and diagnostic analyses of plants. It is also rapidly becoming a key tool in functional annotation of genes and in the comprehensive understanding of the cellular response to biological conditions. Metabolomics approaches have recently been used to assess the natural variance in metabolite content between individual...

This series presents an approach to mathematical biology which makes precise the function of biological molecules. Because biological systems compute, the theory is a general purpose computer language. I build a language for efficiently representing the function of protein-like molecules in a cell. The first paper only presents the kinematic part of the formalism, but this is already useful for...

421 following the linguists, has made so much in his studies on social organization and which is essential also to the explanation of the psychoanalytically interesting dichotomy of self and other, seems to require the integrity of the area comprising the inferior parietal lobe. Evidence is also at hand to support the proposal that there is a localizable neurognostic structure governing the exp...