Docking by knife or elastrator had no sustained effect on growth of lambs 0 to 8 wk postpartum. However, during the 2 wk period postdocking, growth of lambs was limited or depressed, regardless of whether lambs were docked by knife at 14, 28 or 42 d of age. Blood hematocrit and hemoglobin were decreased (P less than .01) 1 d after docking by knife and 14 d after docking by elastrator. Neither m...

Microelectromechanical system (MEMS) technology promises to improve performance of future spacecraft components while reducing mass, cost, and manufacturing time. Arrays of microcilia actuators offer a lightweight alternative to conventional docking systems for miniature satellites. Instead of mechanical guiding structures, such a system uses a surface tiled with MEMS cilia actuators to guide t...

The main key to success in structure-based drug discovery is the accurate prediction of binding affinities of hit compounds. Molecular docking and scoring functions are often used for this purpose. However, it is often found that the top-ranked docking poses do not represent the right binding mode, and frequently there is no correlation between docking score and biological data. Therefore, “pos...

Structural details of protein-protein interactions are invaluable for understanding and deciphering biological mechanisms. Computational docking methods aim to predict the structure of a protein-protein complex given the structures of its single components. Protein flexibility and the absence of robust scoring functions pose a great challenge in the docking field. Due to these difficulties most...

BACKGROUND Protein-based pharmacophore models are enriched with the information of potential interactions between ligands and the protein target. We have shown in a previous study that protein-based pharmacophore models can be applied for ligand pose prediction and pose ranking. In this publication, we present a new pharmacophore-based docking program PharmDock that combines pose sampling and r...

Human immunodeficiency virus infection/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) is a disease pertained to the human immune system. Given its crucial role in viral replication, HIV-1 protease (HIV-1 PR) is a prime therapeutic target in AIDS therapy. In this regard, the dynamic aspects of ligand-enzyme interactions may indicate an important role of conformational variability in HIV-1 PR inhi...

Decoys As the Reference State (DARS) is a simple and natural approach to the construction of structure-based intermolecular potentials. The idea is generating a large set of docked conformations with good shape complementarity but without accounting for atom types, and using the frequency of interactions extracted from these decoys as the reference state. In principle, the resulting potential i...

Blocking protein-protein interactions (PPI) using small molecules or peptides modulates biochemical pathways and has therapeutic significance. PPI inhibition for designing drug-like molecules is a new area that has been explored extensively during the last decade. Considering the number of available PPI inhibitor databases and the limited number of 3D structures available for proteins, docking ...

Docking nowadays is a widely used tool and has successfully and repeatedly been applied to identify hits with new chemical scaffolds [1]. Despite its successful applications, docking still suffers mainly form its scoring functions, which tend to be optimized for speed to the disadvantage of accuracy. Because of that, docking successfully enriches active molecules compared to inactive ones, howe...

Search and Rescue (SAR) Robotics has been gaining an increasing interest in recent years. In spite of that, there are still many challenges to be addressed in terms of autonomy level. RAPOSA is a semi-autonomous, tracked wheels robot, designed for SAR operations. This paper presents an autonomous docking algorithm. The docking is performed to a docking station that provides both power and a wir...