Mailing GP reply letters after psychiatric assessment - a pilot randomised controlled trial.

Background: Patients are not always fully aware of the details of their assessment and management plan detailed in the letter sent from the specialist to the general practitioner following referral. One approach to solving this problem is for the specialist to copy the GP reply letter to the patient.

Objective: To determine whether receiving a copy of the GP reply letter improves outcomes in patients referred by their GP for a psychiatric assessment.

Engineering stabilized vascular endothelial growth factor-A antagonists: synthesis, structural characterization, and bioactivity of grafted analogues of cyclotides.

Cyclotides are plant derived mini-proteins with compact folded structures and exceptional stability. Their stability derives from a head-to-tail cyclized backbone coupled with a cystine knot arrangement of three-conserved disulfide bonds. Taking advantage of this stable framework we developed novel VEGF-A antagonists by grafting a peptide epitope involved in VEGF-A antagonism onto the stable cyclotide framework.

The absolute structural requirement for a proline in the P3'-position of Bowman-Birk protease inhibitors is surmounted in the minimized SFTI-1 scaffold.

SFTI-1 is a small cyclic peptide from sunflower seeds that is one of the most potent trypsin inhibitors of any naturally occurring peptide and is related to the Bowman-Birk family of inhibitors (BBIs). BBIs are involved in the defense mechanisms of plants and also have potential as cancer chemopreventive agents. At only 14 amino acids in size, SFTI-1 is thought to be a highly optimized scaffold of the BBI active site region, and thus it is of interest to examine its important structural and functional features.

Discovery, structural determination, and putative processing of the precursor protein that produces the cyclic trypsin inhibitor sunflower trypsin inhibitor 1.

Backbone-cyclized proteins are becoming increasingly well known, although the mechanism by which they are processed from linear precursors is poorly understood. In this report the sequence and structure of the linear precursor of a cyclic trypsin inhibitor, sunflower trypsin inhibitor 1 (SFTI-1) from sunflower seeds, is described. The structure indicates that the major elements of the reactive site loop of SFTI-1 are present before processing.