This paper considers a distributed system of software agents who cooperate in helping their users to find services, provided by different agents. The agents need to ensure that the service providers they select are trustworthy. Because the agents are autonomous and there is no central trusted authority, the agents help each other determine the trustworthiness of the service providers they are i...

We have expressed recombinant RNase P protein from Escherichia coli in high yield. A hexahistidine sequence at the amino terminus allowed protein purification in a single step. Mass spectrometry confirmed the molecular weight of the purified protein and indicated a purity of > 95%. Protein functionality was demonstrated by reconstitution of active holoenzyme.

Site-specific fluorescent labeling of proteins in vivo remains one of the most powerful techniques for imaging complex processes in live cells. Although fluorescent proteins in many colors are useful tools for tracking expression and localization of fusion proteins in cells, these relatively large tags (>220 aa) can perturb protein folding, trafficking and function. Much smaller genetically enc...

BACKGROUND Making peptide pharmaceuticals involves challenging processes where many barriers, which include production and manufacture, need to be overcome. A non common but interesting research area is related to peptides with intracellular targets, which opens up new possibilities, allowing the modulation of processes occurring within the cell or interference with signaling pathways. However,...

Recombinant clathrin protein fragments form assemblies that template gold nanocrystals in an array across the latticed surface. The nanocrystals exhibit unusual anisotropic morphologies with long range ordering, both of which are dependent upon the presence of a hexahistidine tag on the clathrin heavy chain fragments.

Dialogue Games and Trust for Communicating Agents Jihad Labban Multi-agent applications are primarily based on agent interactions, which are constrained by the trust of participating agents. Two important issues in these applications are how agents can communicate in a flexible and efficient way and how an agent can authenticate information conveyed by other agents in the system. In this thesis...