Quantitative stove use and ventilation guidance for behavior change strategies.

Achieving World Health Organization air quality targets and aspirational fuel savings targets through clean cooking solutions will require high usage rates of high-performing products and low usage rates of traditional stoves. Catalyzing this shift is challenging as fuel and stove use practices associated with new technologies generally differ from those used with traditional technologies. Accompanying this shift with ventilation improvements can help further reduce exposure to emissions of health damaging pollutants.

Quantitative Guidance for Stove Usage and Performance to Achieve Health and Environmental Targets.

Background: Displacing the use of polluting and inefficient cookstoves in developing countries is necessary to achieve the potential health and environmental benefits sought through clean cooking solutions. Yet little quantitative context has been provided on how much displacement of traditional technologies is needed to achieve targets for household air pollutant concentrations or fuel savings.

Objectives: This paper provides instructive guidance on the usage of cooking technologies required to achieve health and environmental improvements.

Target selection and annotation for the structural genomics of the amidohydrolase and enolase superfamilies.

To study the substrate specificity of enzymes, we use the amidohydrolase and enolase superfamilies as model systems; members of these superfamilies share a common TIM barrel fold and catalyze a wide range of chemical reactions. Here, we describe a collaboration between the Enzyme Specificity Consortium (ENSPEC) and the New York SGX Research Center for Structural Genomics (NYSGXRC) that aims to maximize the structural coverage of the amidohydrolase and enolase superfamilies. Using sequence- and structure-based protein comparisons, we first selected 535 target proteins from a variety of genomes for high-throughput structure determination by X-ray crystallography; 63 of these targets were not previously annotated as superfamily members.

Evolutionarily conserved substrate substructures for automated annotation of enzyme superfamilies.

The evolution of enzymes affects how well a species can adapt to new environmental conditions. During enzyme evolution, certain aspects of molecular function are conserved while other aspects can vary. Aspects of function that are more difficult to change or that need to be reused in multiple contexts are often conserved, while those that vary may indicate functions that are more easily changed or that are no longer required.

Evolution of structure and function in the o-succinylbenzoate synthase/N-acylamino acid racemase family of the enolase superfamily.

Understanding how proteins evolve to provide both exquisite specificity and proficient activity is a fundamental problem in biology that has implications for protein function prediction and protein engineering. To study this problem, we analyzed the evolution of structure and function in the o-succinylbenzoate synthase/N-acylamino acid racemase (OSBS/NAAAR) family, part of the mechanistically diverse enolase superfamily. Although all characterized members of the family catalyze the OSBS reaction, this family is extraordinarily divergent, with some members sharing <15% identity.

The Structure Superposition Database.

The need for new tools for investigating biological systems on a large scale is becoming acute, particularly with respect to computationally intensive analyses such as comparisons of many three-dimensional protein structures. Structure superposition is a valuable approach for understanding evolutionary relationships and for the prediction of function. But while available tools are adequate for generating and viewing superpositions of single pairs of protein structures, these tools are generally too cumbersome and time-consuming for examining multiple superpositions.