Protein and Peptide Letters - Volume 21, Issue 8, 2014

Laccases belong to the multicopper binding protein family that catalysis the reduction of oxygen molecule to produce water. These enzymes are glycosylated proteins and have been isolated and purified from fungi, bacteria, plant, insects and lichens. The variety of commercial and industrial application of laccases has attracted much attention towards the research addressing different aspects of the protein characterization, Read More

Serine Protease inhibitors (serpins) are a super-family of proteins that controls the proteinases involved in the inflammation, complementation, coagulation and fibrinolytic pathways. Serpins are prone to conformational diseases due to a complex inhibition mechanism that involves large scale conformational change, and their susceptibility to undergo point mutations might lead to functional defects. Serpins are associate Read More

In the present study, we have evaluated the impacts of point mutations on structural and functional evolution of hypothetical proteins identical to bacterial ADP-ribosylation superfamily members using bioinformatics approaches. A combined approach of molecular modelling and dynamics was employed to generate energetically stable structures from hypothetical protein sequences. Improper energy and structural constraints Read More

We developed a support vector machine based web server called SVM-PB-Pred, to predict the Protein Block for any given amino acid sequence. The input features of SVM-PB-Pred include i) sequence profiles (PSSM) and ii) actual secondary structures (SS) from DSSP method or predicted secondary structures from NPS@ and GOR4 methods. There were three combined input features PSSM+SS(DSSP), PSSM+SS(NPS@) an Read More

Protein folding rate is a valuable clue for understanding the variations in protein folding kinetics. The ability to accurately discriminate protein folding rate change is very helpful in protein design. However, there are fewer studies on the influence of amino acid substitution to protein folding rates. In our earlier studies, we constructed a dataset of 467 mutants upon amino acid substitution and proposed novel methods for disc Read More

Free energy landscapes, backbone flexibility and residue-residue couplings for being co-rigid or co-flexible are calculated from the minimal Distance Constraint Model (mDCM) on an exploratory dataset consisting of VL, scFv and Fab antibody fragments. Experimental heat capacity curves are reproduced markedly well, and an analysis of quantitative stability/flexibility relationships (QSFR) is applied to a representative VL do Read More

The elucidation of protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks is important for understanding cellular structure and function and structure-based drug design. However, the development of an effective method to conduct exhaustive PPI screening represents a computational challenge. We have been investigating a protein docking approach based on shape complementarity and physicochemical properties. We describe here the Read More

Molecular function in cellular processes is governed by protein-protein interactions (PPIs) within biological networks. Selective yet specific association of these protein partners contributes to diverse functionality such as catalysis, regulation, assembly, immunity, and inhibition in a cell. Therefore, understanding the principles of protein-protein association has been of immense interest for several decades. We provide an Read More

Core elements of cell regulation are made up of protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks. However, many parts of the cell regulatory systems include unknown PPIs. To approach this problem, we have developed a computational method of high-throughput PPI network prediction based on all-to-all rigid-body docking of protein tertiary structures. The prediction system accepts a set of data comprising protein tertiary structu Read More

Protein-carbohydrate interactions play important roles in several biological processes in living organisms. Understanding the recognition mechanism of protein-carbohydrate complexes is a challenging task in molecular and computational biology. In this work, we have developed an energy based approach for identifying the binding sites and important residues for binding in protein-carbohydrate complexes. Our met Read More

Nuclear receptors constitute a super family of protein hormones that serve as transcription factors. They typically reside in the cytosol and, after ligand binding, migrate to the nucleus to exert their biological action. Ligands are lipophilic, small molecules including retinoids, steroids, thyroxine, and vitamin D. Nuclear receptors being important regulators of gene expression, constitute 13% of proteins targeted by various drugs. T Read More

Dengue virus (DENV), one of the members of genus Flavivirus is emerging as a global threat to human health. It had led to the emergence of dengue fever (flu-like illness), dengue shock syndrome, and the most severe dengue hemorrhagic fever (severe dengue with bleeding abnormalities). As Dengue hemorrhage diseases are the life-threatening ones, attempts are being made worldwide to design inhibitors f Read More

Autoimmune diseases are often intractable because their causes are unknown. Identifying which genes contribute to these diseases may allow us to understand the pathogenesis, but it is difficult to determine which genes contribute to disease. Recently, epigenetic information has been considered to activate/deactivate disease-related genes. Thus, it may also be useful to study epigenetic information that differs between Read More

Background. Obesity is a major health problem in both developed and emerging countries. Obesity is a complex disease whose etiology involves genetic factors in strong interplay with environmental determinants and lifestyle. The discovery of genetic factors and biological pathways underlying human obesity is hampered by the difficulty in controlling the genetic background of human cohorts. Animal models are then Read More

Text mining methods can facilitate the generation of biomedical hypotheses by suggesting novel associations between diseases and genes. Previously, we developed a rare-term model called RaJoLink (Petric et al, J. Biomed. Inform. 42(2): 219-227, 2009) in which hypotheses are formulated on the basis of terms rarely associated with a target domain. Since many current medical hypotheses are formulated in ter Read More

Identification and elimination of noise peaks in mass spectra from large proteomics data streams simultaneously improves the accuracy of peptide identification and significantly decreases the size of the data. There are a number of peak filtering strategies that can achieve this goal. Here we present a simple algorithm wherein the number of highest intensity peaks retained for further analysis is proportional to the mass of the Read More