We considered alpha-chymotrypsin (CT) in homogeneous water-organic media as a model system to examine the influence of enzyme chemical modification with hydrophilic and hydrophobic substances on its stability, activity and structure. Both types of modifying agents may lead to considerable stabilization of the enzyme in water-ethanol and water-DMF mixtures: (i) the range of organic cosolvent con...

Enzymatic synthesis of oligopeptides from l-phenylalanine ethyl ester hydrochloride (l-Phe-Et.HCl) and other l-form hydrophobic amino acid ester hydrochlorides in water miscible organic cosolvents was studied. Different proteases, water miscible cosolvents, and effect of different ratios of water miscible cosolvents for protease-catalyzed oligo-phenylalanine [oligo(l-Phe)] were compared. The im...

Bone tissue engineering (BTE) requires a sturdy biomaterial for scaffolds for restoration of large bone defects. Ideally, the scaffold should have a mechanical strength comparable to the natural bone in the implanted site. We show that adding cosolvent during the processing of our previously developed composite of hydroxyapatite-gelatin with a silane cross-linker can significantly affect its me...

Bromodomains are α-helical bundles of approximately 110 residues that recognize acetylated lysine side chains mainly on histone tails. Bromodomains are known to play an important role in cancer and inflammation, and as such, significant efforts are being made to identify small-molecule inhibitors of these epigenetic reader proteins. Here, explicit solvent molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of ...