ProSTRIP: A method to find similar structural repeats in three-dimensional protein structures

The occurrence of similar structural repeats in a protein structure has evolved through gene duplication. These repeats act as a structural building block and form more than one compact structural and functional unit called a repeat domain. The protein families comprising similar structural repeats are mainly involved in protein–protein interactions as well as binding to other ligand molecules. The identification of internal sequence repeats in the primary structure is not sufficient for the analysis of structural repeats. Thus, a new method called ProSTRIP has been developed using dynamic programming to find the similar structural repeats in a three-dimensional protein structure. The detection of these repeats is made by calculating the protein backbone Cα angles. An internet computing server is also created by implementing this method and enables graphical visualization of the results. It can be freely accessed at http://cluster.physics.iisc.ernet.in/prostrip/.     

Quantitative Characterization of Bovine Serum Albumin, α-Lactalbumin and β-Lactoglobulin in Commercial Whey Sample by RP-LC

A simple, sensitive and precise reverse phase liquid chromatographic method has been developed and validated for quantification of bovine serum albumin (BSA), α-lactalbumin (α-La) and β–lactoglobulin (β-Lg) that are removed from whey waste by foam fractionation method. The data is reproducible over a wide concentration range. This optimized method allowed analysis of BSA, α-La, β-Lg in a mixture within 5 min and could be applied to the analysis of a variety of commercial and laboratory whey products within a short time.     

Studies on elemental charge-changing cross-section for relativistic U+Al collisions using CR-39 (DOP) detector

Summary A search has been made on the charge-changing partial cross-sections by using 0.927 GeV/n²³⁸U ion from LBL BEVALAC projected at an angle 30° on²⁷Al target and CR-39 (DOP) was used as analyser. The irradiated plastic sheets were duly etched for one hour in 6.25N NaOH solution and about 1680 cone lengths at both the surfaces of the CR-39 (DOP) sheets were optically measured. The cone length distribution exhibits the existence of U fragments in the charge range 84≤Z≤91 and the estimated partial cross-sections range from 60 to 400 mb. The present data are in accord with the fit to the extrapolated data of Binnset al.     

Solvent extraction of silver(I) with amberlite-LA-2 using110mAg as tracer

The use of Amberlite-LA-2, a high molecular weight secondary amine, for the radiochemical solvent extraction of Ag(I) present as anionic thiosulfato complex at pH 3 is described. The effects of different parameters on the extraction and preconcentration have been studied in detail. The method was successfully applied in the determination of silver in several synthetic mixutres and also in a few medicinal samples.     

The ball generated property in operator spaces

The Ball Generated Property (BGP) was introduced by Corson and Lindenstrauss and subsequently analysed in detail by Godefroy and Kalton. In this work, the (BGP) is studied in spaces of operators. It is shown that (BGP) is stable under c₀ and l_p-sums for 1 < p < ∞ and a characterization is provided for C(K, X)-spaces with (BGP). A similar characterization is obtained for L(X, C(K))-spaces. (BGP) is shown to be stable under injective tensor products.     

Designing the Molybdopterin Core through Regioselective Coupling of Building Blocks

Molybdopterin is an essential cofactor for all forms of life. The cofactor is composed of a pterin moiety appended to a dithiolene‐functionalized pyran ring, and through the dithiolene moiety it binds metal ions. Different synthetic strategies for dithiolene‐functionalized pyran precursors that have been designed and synthesized are discussed. These precursors also harbor 1,2‐diketone or osone functionality that has been condensed with 1,2‐diaminobenzene or other heterocycles resulting in several quinoxaline or pterin derivatives. Use of additives improves the regioselectivity of the complexes. The molecules have been characterized by ¹H and ¹³C NMR and IR spectroscopies, as well as by mass spectrometry. In addition, several compounds have been crystallographically characterized. The geometries of the synthesized molecules are more planar than the geometry of the cofactor found in proteins.     

Scrambled Geometric Net Integration Over General Product Spaces

Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) sampling has been developed for integration over \([0,1]^s\) where it has superior accuracy to Monte Carlo (MC) for integrands of bounded variation. Scrambled net quadrature allows replication-based error estimation for QMC with at least the same accuracy and for smooth enough integrands even better accuracy than plain QMC. Integration over triangles, spheres, disks and Cartesian products of such spaces is more difficult for QMC because the induced integrand on a unit cube may fail to have the desired regularity. In this paper, we present a construction of point sets for numerical integration over Cartesian products of s spaces of dimension d, with triangles (\(d=2\)) being of special interest. The point sets are transformations of randomized (t, m, s)-nets using recursive geometric partitions. The resulting integral estimates are unbiased, and their variance is o(1 / n) for any integrand in \(L^2\) of the product space. Under smoothness assumptions on the integrand, our randomized QMC algorithm has variance \(O(n^{-1 - 2/d} (\log n)^{s-1})\), for integration over s-fold Cartesian products of d-dimensional domains, compared to \(O(n^{-1})\) for ordinary MC.