Computational Investigation of the pH Dependence of Stability of Melanosome Proteins: Implication for Melanosome formation and Disease.

Intravesicular pH plays a crucial role in melanosome maturation and function. Melanosomal pH changes during maturation from very acidic in the early stages to neutral in late stages. Neutral pH is critical for providing optimal conditions for the rate-limiting, pH-sensitive melanin-synthesizing enzyme tyrosinase (TYR).

BION-2: Predicting Positions of Non-Specifically Bound Ions on Protein Surface by a Gaussian-Based Treatment of Electrostatics.

Ions play significant roles in biological processes-they may specifically bind to a protein site or bind non-specifically on its surface. Although the role of specifically bound ions ranges from actively providing structural compactness via coordination of charge-charge interactions to numerous enzymatic activities, non-specifically surface-bound ions are also crucial to maintaining a protein's stability, responding to pH and ion concentration changes, and contributing to other biological processes. However, the experimental determination of the positions of non-specifically bound ions is not trivial, since they may have a low residential time and experience significant thermal fluctuation of their positions.

Modeling Electrostatic Force in Protein-Protein Recognition.

Electrostatic interactions are important for understanding molecular interactions, since they are long-range interactions and can guide binding partners to their correct binding positions. To investigate the role of electrostatic forces in molecular recognition, we calculated electrostatic forces between binding partners separated at various distances. The investigation was done on a large set of 275 protein complexes using recently developed DelPhiForce tool and in parallel, evaluating the total electrostatic force via electrostatic association energy.

Effective role of CaO/PO ratio on SiO-CaO-PO glass system.

In the present work, the effect of the CaO/PO ratio on the composition of sol-gel synthesized 58SiO-(19 - )PO-(23 + )CaO ( = 0, 5, 10 and 15 mol%) glass samples was studied. Further, the effect of NBO/BO ratio on hydroxy carbonated apatite layer (HCA) forming ability based on dissolution behavior in simulated body fluid (SBF) solution was also investigated. CaO/PO ratios of synthesized glass samples were 1.

Application of Region of Interest Compressed Sensing to accelerate magnetic resonance angiography.

Magnetic Resonance Angiography (MRA) is a group of techniques based on Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to image blood vessels. Compressed Sensing (CS) is a mathematical framework to reconstruct MR images from sparse data to minimize the data acquisition time. Image sparsity is the key in CS to reconstruct MR images.