Enzyme kinetics studies normally focus on the initial rate of enzymatic reaction. However, the manual operation of steps of the conventional enzyme kinetics method has some drawbacks. Errors can result from the imprecise time control and time necessary for manual changing the reaction cuvettes into and out of the detector. By using the automatic flow-based analytical systems, enzyme kinetics st...

Random fluctuations in the amount of cellular components like mRNA and protein molecules are inevitable due to the stochastic and discrete nature of biochemical reactions. If large enough, this so-called "cellular noise" can lead to random transitions between the expression states of a multistable genetic circuit. That way, heterogeneity within isogenic populations is created. Our aim is to und...

A small number of developmental signaling pathways are used repeatedly throughout development in many different contexts. How these pathways interact with each other and the specific cell context to generate a wide range of appropriate responses remains an important question. The application of genomic and proteomic approaches and imaging at high spatiotemporal resolution are providing answers ...

MAE WAN HO: My name is Mae Wan Ho. I obtained my Bachelor of Science degree in Biology in 1964, and my Ph. D. in Biochemistry in 1967 from Hong Kong University, and was Postdoctoral Fellow in Biochemical Genetics, in the University of California in San Diego from 1968 to 1972. During that time, I won a competitive Fellowship of the US National Genetics Foundation, which took me to London Univer...

RNA genes are ubiquitous in the cell and are involved in a number of biochemical processes. Because there is a close relationship between function and structure, software tools that predict the secondary structure of noncoding RNAs from the base sequence are very helpful. In this article, we focus our attention on the inference of conserved secondary structure for a group of homologous RNA sequ...

We derive a convex optimization problem on a steady-state nonequilibrium network of biochemical reactions, with the property that energy conservation and the second law of thermodynamics both hold at the problem solution. This suggests a new variational principle for biochemical networks that can be implemented in a computationally tractable manner. We derive the Lagrange dual of the optimizati...

A novel, inexpensive and versatile ionic-liquid-based catch and release mass spectrometry tag (I-Tag) that facilitates substrate purification, fast, robust and sensitive enzymatic reaction monitoring and quantitative kinetic analysis has been developed. The applicability of the system has been demonstrated in an enzymatic assay with β-1,4-galactosyltransferase.

Temperature controls the rate of fundamental biochemical processes and thereby regulates organismal attributes including development rate and survival. The increase in metabolic rate with temperature explains substantial among-species variation in life-history traits, population dynamics, and ecosystem processes. Temperature can also cause variability in metabolic rate within species. Here, we ...

Networks coming from protein-protein interactions, transcriptional regulation, signaling, or metabolism may appear to have "unusual" properties. To quantify this, it is appropriate to randomize the network and test the hypothesis that the network is not statistically different from expected in a motivated ensemble. However, when dealing with metabolic networks, the randomization of the network ...

Analyses of the natural variation in stable isotopes of components of ecological systems have provided new insights into how these systems function across paleoecological to modern timescales and across a wide range of spatial scales. Isotope abundances of the molecules in biological materials and geochemical profiles are viewed as recorders that can be used to reconstruct ecological processes ...