Medical & Biotech – Page 190 – TechConnect Briefs

Solving the Protein Structure Prediction Problem Through a Multiobjective Genetic Algorithm

Day R.O., Zydallis J.B., Lamont G.B., Pachter R., Air Force Institute of Technology, US

The Protein Structure Prediction (PSP) problem is a Grand Challenge problem among biochemists, computer scientists and engineers alike. Solving this problem involves correctly predicting the geometrical conformation of a fully folded protein. This paper focuses [...]

Building and Testing Scalable Fuzzy Models of Genetic Regulation in Bacteria

Sokhansanj B.A., Rodrigue G.R., Fitch J.P., Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, US

Recent technological advances in high-throughput data collection (reviewed in [1]) give biologists the ability to study increasingly complex systems as a whole. One example is the DNA chip or microarray, an efficient high-throughput method for [...]

Stochastic Optimization Methods for Biomolecular Structure Prediction

Herges T., Wenzel W., Institute for Nanotechnology - Karlsruhe, DE

Protein structure prediction (PSP) remains one of the main outstanding challenges of theoretical biophysical chemistry. Its goal is to predict the fully three-dimensional tertiary structure of the protein on the basis of its amino acid [...]

Sequence and Biological Structure

Simulation Studies of Channels in Biological Membranes

Henderson D., Busath D.D., Rowley R.L., Crozier P.S., Boda D., Brigham Young University, US

The results of our recent studies of the selectivity of a calcium channel by means of a Monte Carlo simulation and of the conductance of ions in a model channel by means of a molecular [...]

Mechanisms of Selectivity in Biological Ion Channels

Nonner W., University of Miami, US

Ca, K and Na channels of biological membrandes are proteins that pass ions through a molecular pore, thereby selecting particular ions of biological importance. We repore here theoretical work suggesting that interactions among charged hard [...]

Three-Dimensional Continuum Simulation of Biological Ion Channels

van der Straaten T.A., Tang J., Eisenberg R.S., Ravaioli U., Aluru N., Rush Medical College, US

We present a self-consistent continuum 3-D simulation of ion permeation through the ompF porin channel, a protein found in the membrane of the e-coli bacterium. The model is based on the simultaneous solution of Poisson's [...]

Ionic Channels as Biodevices

Eisenberg R.S., Rush Medical Center, US

Ion channels are proteins with a hole down their middle of great biological and medical importance studied in thousand of laboratories. Ions move through channels of known structure obeying the relatively simple laws of electrodiffusion. [...]

Statistical Theory for Protein Combinatorial Libraries

Kono H., Zou J., Saven J.G., University of Pennsylvania, US

Combinatorial experiments provide new ways to probe the determinants of protein folding and to identify novel folding amino acid sequences. These types of experiments, however, are complicated by both enormous conformational complexity and by large [...]

Detecting Secondary Peptide Structures by Scaling a Genetic Algorithm

Michaud S.R., Zydallis J.B., Lamont G.B., Pachter R., Air Force Institute of Technology, US

The ability to accurately predict a polypeptide's molecular structure given its amino acid sequence is important to numerous scientific, medical, and engineering applications. Studies have been conducted in the application of Genetic Algorithms (GAs) to [...]