Rab proteins are generally required for transport vesicle docking. We have exploited yeast secretion mutants to demonstrate that a rab protein is required for v-SNAREs and t-SNAREs to assemble. The absence of the rab protein in the docking complex suggests that, in a broad sense, rab proteins participate in a reaction catalyzing SNARE complex assembly. In so doing, rab proteins could help impar...

In this study, we aimed to determine VEGFR-2, EGFR and PDGFR-β tyrosine kinase inhibitory activities of some pyrrolo[2,3-d]pyrimidine derivatives previously synthesized and showed potent cytotoxic and apoptotic effects against several cancer cell lines by our group and to evaluate the relationships between inhibitory activities and binding properties of the active compounds by molecular docking...

We have developed a generic evolutionary method with an empirical scoring function for the protein-ligand docking, which is a problem of paramount importance in structure-based drug design. This approach, referred to as the GEMDOCK (Generic Evolutionary Method for molecular DOCKing), combines both continuous and discrete search mechanisms. We tested our approach on seven protein-ligand complexe...

BACKGROUND Tail biting is a common and serious welfare problem in pig production, causing large economical losses. Tail docking is performed routinely in most EU countries to reduce the tail biting risk. However, tail docking is painful, and does not prevent tail biting totally. The risk factors behind tail docking are multifactorial and most analyses are based on studies using biological or ep...

An innovative approach to automatic spacecraft docking using a computer vision-based control system is introduced. Precision control of the relative spacecraft velocity is required to achieve "soft" docking with a docking platform on a space station or on another spacecraft. We propose use of a computer vision system as a position and orientation sensor for obtaining feedback information used b...

Intermolecular binding underlies every metabolic and regulatory processes of the cell, and the therapeutic and pharmacological properties of drugs. Molecular docking systems model and simulate these interactions in silico and allow us to study the binding process. Haptic-based docking provides an immersive virtual docking environment where the user can interact with and guide the molecules to t...

Based on a protein-protein docking approach we have developed a procedure to verify or falsify protein-protein interactions that were proposed by other methods such as yeast-2-hybrid assays. Our method currently utilizes intermolecular energies but can be expanded to incorporate additional terms such as amino acid based pair-potentials. We show some early results that demonstrate the general ap...