Pharmaceutical industry is currently undergoing a transient phase with new orientation. Loss of financial resources, presence of new therapeutic agents and increasing cost of research and development have called for a full.scale restructuring within the pharmaceutical industry to retain even the most basic competitiveness. The development of new technologies has been as one way out of the dile...

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are biological molecules bridging the innate and acquired immune systems of the defense mechanism. They have been found to be effective against not only Gram-positive and -negative bacterial species but also fungi and viruses with their broad spectrum of activity. Among the various niches where they are found in the human body, in the oral cavity, the AMPs are secr...

The Academy was founded in the early nineteenth century to promote learning in the Netherlands. In 1851 the 'Royal Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts', which had been in existence since 1808, became the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences', with two divisions: one for mathematics and the natural sciences and one for literary and historical scholarship. Based in the Trippenhuis i...

This April, in Cambridge (UK), principal investigators from the Mathematical Biology Group of the Medical Research Council's National Institute of Medical Research organized a workshop in structural bioinformatics at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences. Bioinformatics researchers of several nationalities from labs around the country presented and discussed their computational work in biomolecu...

A recent experiment of exceptional complexity has shown that a myosin may lose its ATP but store the energy from it and attach to actin and perform a working stroke several hundred milliseconds later.

An implicit surface of a density function is the set of points at which the value of the function is equal to a fixed threshold. An object that is defined as the collection of points at which the density function value is above the threshold can be visualized by displaying the implicit surface. Some methods for the reconstruction of biological macromolecules from their electron microscopic proj...

An important part of protein structure characterization is the determination of excluded space such as fissures in contact interfaces, pores, inaccessible cavities, and catalytic pockets. We introduce a general tessellation method for visualizing the dual space around, within, and between biological molecules. Using Delaunay triangulation, a three-dimensional graph is constructed to provide a d...

I. Carbohydrates Carbohydrates are also called saccharides, which is derived from the Greek word sakcharon meaning sugar. The simplest carbohydrates are called monosaccharides, and the biologically important monosaccharides contain from 3 to 7 carbon atoms. The monosaccharides with 5 carbons (the pentoses) and with 6 carbons (the hexoses) may take on different configurations in an aqueous solut...

Microbial ecology is flourishing, and in the process, is making contributions to how the ecology and biology of large organisms is understood. Ongoing advances in sequencing technology and computational methods have enabled the collection and analysis of vast amounts of molecular data from diverse biological communities. While early studies focused on cataloguing microbial biodiversity in envir...

Dedication To my Father, Who is in heaven. To my Brother, through Whom all things came into being. To my Helper, Who teaches me all things. I will lift up my eyes to the mountains; From where shall my help come? My help comes from the LORD, Who made heaven and earth. Acknowledgements First, I would like to thank Dr. Daniel Dix, my thesis advisor, who has patiently guided me through this long pr...