Network Modeling of Crohn's Disease Incidence.

Background: Numerous genetic and environmental risk factors play a role in human complex genetic disorders (CGD). However, their complex interplay remains to be modelled and explained in terms of disease mechanisms.

Methods And Findings: Crohn's Disease (CD) was modeled as a modular network of patho-physiological functions, each summarizing multiple gene-gene and gene-environment interactions.

Genetic susceptibility to a complex disease: the key role of functional redundancy.

Complex diseases involve both a genetic component and a response to environmental factors or lifestyle changes. Recently, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have succeeded in identifying hundreds of polymorphisms that are statistically associated with complex diseases. However, the association is usually weak and none of the associated allelic forms is either necessary or sufficient for the disease occurrence.

Unstructured hydrophilic sequences in prokaryotic proteomes correlate with dehydration tolerance and host association.

Water loss or desiccation is among the most life-threatening stresses. It leads to DNA double-strand breakage, protein aggregation, cell shrinkage, and low water activity precluding all biological functions. Yet, in all kingdoms of life, rare organisms are resistant to desiccation through prevention or reversibility of such damage.

Critical review of general guidelines for membrane proteins model building and analysis.

Membrane proteins play major roles in many biological processes such as signalling, transport, etc. They have been shown to be involved in the development of many diseases and have become important drug targets per se. The understanding of their functional properties may be facilitated if a 3D structure is available.

RASMOT-3D PRO: a 3D motif search webserver.

Detection of structural motif of residues in protein structures allows identification of structural or functional similarity between proteins. In the field of protein engineering, structural motif identification is essential to select protein scaffolds on which a motif of residues can be transferred to design a new protein with a given function. We describe here the RASMOT-3D PRO webserver (http://biodev.

New insights of membrane environment effects on MscL channel mechanics from theoretical approaches.

The prokaryotic mechanosensitive channel of large conductance (MscL) is a remarkable integral membrane protein. During hypo-osmotic shock, it responses to membrane tension through large conformational changes, that lead to an open state of the pore. The structure of the channel from Mycobacterium tuberculosis has been resolved in the closed state.