Continuing our effort to introduce d-amino-acid residues in the united residue (UNRES) force field developed in our laboratory, in this work the Cα ··· Cα ··· Cα backbone-virtual-bond-valence-angle (θ) potentials for systems containing d-amino-acid residues have been developed. The potentials were determined by integrating the combined energy surfaces of all possible triplets of terminally bloc...

Adipose LPL (lipoprotein lipase) plays an important role in regulating plasma triacylglycerols and lipid metabolism. We have previously demonstrated that PKCα (protein kinase Cα) depletion inhibits LPL translation in 3T3-F442A adipocytes. Using in vitro translation experiments, the minimum essential region on the 3′UTR (3′-untranslated region) of LPL mRNA required for the inhibition of translat...

Most protein structural prediction algorithms assemble structures as reduced models that represent amino acids by a reduced number of atoms to speed up the conformational search. Building accurate full-atom models from these reduced models is a necessary step toward a detailed function analysis. However, it is difficult to ensure that the atomic models retain the desired global topology while m...

Random coe cient regression models have been applied in di erent elds and they constitute a unifying setup for many statistical problems. The nonparametric study of this model started with Beran and Hall (1992) and it has become a fruitful framework. In this paper we propose and study statistics for testing a basic hypothesis concerning this model: the constancy of coe cients. The asymptotic be...

In order to use a predicted protein structure one needs to know how good it is, as the utility of a model depends on its quality. To this aim, many Model Quality Assessment Programs (MQAP) have been developed over the last decade, with MQAP also being assessed at the CASP competition. We present a new knowledge-based MQAP which evaluates single protein structure models. We use a tree representa...

We simulate the electrical properties of a device realized by a G protein coupled receptor (GPCR), embedded in its membrane and in contact with two metallic electrodes through which an external voltage is applied. To this purpose, recently, we have proposed a model based on a coarse graining description, which describes the protein as a network of elementary impedances. The network is built fro...