Current Protein and Peptide Science - Volume 9, Issue 3, 2008

The degradation is critical to activation and deactivation of regulatory proteins involved in signaling pathways to cell growth, differentiation, stress responses and physiological cell death. Proteins carry domains and sequence motifs that function as prerequisite for their proteolysis by either individual proteases or the 26S multicomplex proteasomes. Two models for entry of substrates into the proteasomes have been conside Read More

In the year 1994, the protein MIA (melanoma inhibitory activity) was found to be strongly expressed and secreted by malignant melanomas and subsequent studies revealed that MIA has an important function in melanoma development and invasion. Multidimensional NMR-spectroscopy and x-ray crystallography revealed that recombinant human MIA adopts a Src homology 3 (SH3) domain-like fold in solution, a structure with Read More

The proteasome is a multicatalytic protease complex that degrades most endogenous proteins including misfolded or damaged proteins to ensure normal cellular function. The ubiquitin-proteasome degradation pathway plays an essential role in multiple cellular processes, including cell cycle progression, proliferation, apoptosis and angiogenesis. It has been shown that human cancer cells are more sensitive to proteasome inh Read More

Protein-protein interactions represent targets for drug discovery that are highly relevant in a biological sense, but have proven difficult in a practical sense. Nevertheless, there have been recent successes in discovering drug-like small molecule inhibitors of protein-protein systems. To build on this progress, it is worth analyzing successful cases to understand at a molecular level the strategies by which these compounds effectively i Read More

This review is to summarize three new QSAR (quantitative structure-activity relationship) methods recently developed in our group and their applications for drug design. Based on more solid theoretical models and advanced mathematical techniques, the conventional QSAR technique has been recast in the following three aspects. (1) In the fragment-based two dimensional QSAR, or abbreviated as FB-QSAR, the molec Read More

Optimisation problems pervade structural bioinformatics. In this review, we describe recent work addressing a selection of bioinformatics challenges. We begin with a discussion of research into protein structure comparison, and highlight the utility of Kolmogorov complexity as a measure of structural similarity. We then turn to research into de novo protein structure prediction, in which structures are generated fr Read More

Endostatin, the C-terminal fragment of collagen XVIII, is a potent angiogenesis inhibitor. At present, there are a large number of research papers on endostatin. However, the action mechanism of endostatin is still a matter of ongoing discussion. The objective of this review is to elucidate its origin and elementary structure, and to discuss its structure basis of activity and action mechanisms based on the latest research. Furth Read More

Bacteriophages utilize host bacterial cellular machineries for their own reproduction and completion of life cycles. The early proteins that phage synthesize immediately after the entry of their genomes into bacterial cells participate in inhibiting host macromolecular biosynthesis, initiating phage-specific replication and synthesizing late proteins. Inhibition of synthesis of host macromolecules that eventually leads to cell deat Read More

Amyloidoses are a group of diseases including neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease and also type II diabetes, spongiform encephalopathies and many others, believed to be caused by protein aggregation and subsequent amyloid fibril formation. However, occasionally, living organisms exploit amyloid fibril formation, a property inherent into amino acid sequences, and perform specific physiological funct Read More