For Every Thing There is a Season and a Time …: The Construction of a Humanoid. A Tribute to Vincenzo Tagliasco.

"There's a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak…" (Ecclesiastes 3, 2-7). There was a time when automata were designed like clocks. Androids will have the time of their creators, the state of the art in technology, a wealth of experience to draw from, as well as the capacity to carry out actions as being endowed with meaning.

Conformation-activity relationship of peptide T and new pseudocyclic hexapeptide analogs.

Peptide T (ASTTTNYT), a segment corresponding to residues 185-192 of gp120, the coat protein of HIV, has several important biological properties in vitro that have stimulated the search for simpler and possibly more active analogs. We have previously shown that pseudocyclic hexapeptide analogs containing the central residues of peptide T retain considerable chemotactic activity. We have now extended the design of this type of analogs to peptides containing different aromatic residues and/or Ser in lieu of Thr.

Environmental mimic of receptor interaction: conformational analysis of CCK-15 in solution.

CCK-15, a peptide derived from the 115-membered CCK preprohormone, was the object of a comparative conformational analysis by NMR spectroscopy and molecular modeling methods. NMR data in several solvents demonstrate that the propensity of the peptide to fold into a helical conformation is intrinsic, not merely a consequence of the interaction with phosphatidylcholine micelles or with a putative receptor, as suggested by a previous study on CCK-8 (Pellegrini, M.; Mierke, D.