We describe the design, performance and scientific objectives of the NASA-funded ALICE instrument aboard the ESA Rosetta asteroid flyby/comet rendezvous mission. ALICE is a lightweight, low-power, and low-cost imaging spectrograph optimized for cometary far-ultraviolet (FUV) spectroscopy. It will be the first UV spectrograph to study a comet at close range. It is designed to obtain spatially-re...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Clostridium perfringens, a Gram-positive obligate anaerobic bacterium, is able to form resistant spores which are widely distributed in the environment. C. perfringens is subdivided into five types A to E based on its four major alpha, beta, epsilon and iota toxins. The aim of the present study was cloning and expression of C. perfringens type D vaccine strain epsilon ...

We describe the design concept and scientific objectives of ALICE: a lightweight (2.2 kg), low-power (2.9 W), and low-cost UV imaging spectrometer for the ESA Rosetta Orbiter. Ultraviolet spectroscopy is a powerful tool for studying astrophysical objects, and has been applied with great success to the study of comets. ALICE is designed to obtain far-UV (FUV) spectra of the Rosetta comet nucleus...

Protein core repacking is a standard test of protein modeling software. A recent study of six different modeling software packages showed that they are more successful at predicting side chain conformations of core compared to surface residues. All the modeling software tested have multicomponent energy functions, typically including contributions from solvation, electrostatics, hydrogen bondin...

Computational protein design has been successful in modeling fixed backbone proteins in a single conformation. However, when modeling large ensembles of flexible proteins, current methods in protein design have been insufficient. Large barriers in the energy landscape are difficult to traverse while redesigning a protein sequence, and as a result current design methods only sample a fraction of...

The Rosetta mission provides an unprecedented possibility to study the interaction of comets with the solar wind. As the spacecraft accompanies comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko from its very low-activity stage through its perihelion phase, the physics of mass loading is witnessed for various activity levels of the nucleus. While observations at other comets provided snapshots of the interaction ...

A newly developed statistical pair potential based on Distance-scaled Finite Ideal-gas REference (DFIRE) state is applied to unbound protein-protein docking structure selections. The performance of the DFIRE energy function is compared to those of the well-established ZDOCK energy scores and RosettaDock energy function using the comprehensive decoy sets generated by ZDOCK and RosettaDock. Despi...