Current Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 10, Issue 8, 2003

Small conductance calcium-activated potassium (SK) channels are found in many types of neurons as well as in some other cell types. These channels are selective for K+ and open when intracellular Ca2+ rises to ∼500 nM. In neurons, this occurs during and after an action potential. Activation of SK channels hyperpolarizes the membrane, thus reducing cell excitability for several tens or hundreds of milliseconds. This Read More

Large-conductance Ca2+-activated K+ (BK-Ca) channels differ from most of other K+ channels in that their activation is under dual control, i.e., activated by either increase in intracellular Ca2+ or membrane depolarization. These channels, which are widely distributed in a variety of cells, can control Ca2+ influx as well as a number of Ca2+-dependent physiological processes. In neurons or neuroendocrine cells, BK-Ca cha Read More

Microwaves are used in medical applications, so their eventual toxicity effects must be carefully evaluated. An integral toxicity test, based on the monitoring of the respiratory activity of yeast cells, is proposed to evaluate the damage from microwave exposure. Different exposure times and microwave powers were considered. On supposing that the damages occur at enzymatic levels, the inhibiting effects of microwave expo Read More

While photoaffinity ligands have been widely used to probe the structures of many receptors and nucleic acid binding proteins, their effective use in the study of cytochrome P450 structure is less established. Nevertheless, significant advances in this field have been made since the technique was first applied to P450cam in 1979. In several cases, especially studies involving P450s of the 1A and 2B families, peptides covalently modi Read More

The more profound understanding of the genetics and molecular pathways driving human tumorigensis is paralleled by an ongoing interest to translate this knowledge into development of cancer biomarkers, termed molecular tumor markers. The molecular changes observed in tumors frequently constitute early events which are detectable as signatures of malignancy in body fluids and their occurrence may preceede cl Read More

The dramatically increasing number of compounds that become available for biological evaluation presents a significant challenge for database design, management, and mining. Computational approaches for screening, profiling, or filtering of large compound collections are by now widely used in pharmaceutical research. Among popular compound classification and database mining techniques, partitioning methods are co Read More