Alzheimer’s disease (AD) as a complicated and progressive neurodegenerative disorder is the most common form of dementia and memory loss. On account of the multifactorial etiology of AD, the multi-target-directed ligand (MTDL) approach is a promising method in searching new drug candidates for this disease. Here, in this paper more than 500 tacrine-coumarin hybrids have been designed and drug-l...

Gap junction (GJ) channels mediate direct intercellular communication and are composed of two docked hemichannels (connexin oligomers). It is well documented that the docking and formation of GJs are possible only between compatible hemichannels (or connexins). The mechanisms of heterotypic docking compatibility are not fully clear. We aligned the protein sequences of docking-compatible and -in...

Tail docking of piglets is a routine procedure on farms to control tail-biting behaviour; however, docking can cause an acute stress response. The objectives of this research were to determine the stress responses to tail docking in piglets and to compare two methods of tail docking; cautery iron (CAUT) and the more commonly used blunt trauma cutters (BT). At approximately 6 days of age, piglet...

Interaction profile method is a useful method for processing rigid-body docking. After the docking process, the resulting set of docking poses could be classified by calculating similarities among them using these interaction profiles to search for near-native poses. However, there are some cases where the near-native poses are not included in this set of docking poses even when the bound-state...

Most state-of-the-art protein-protein docking algorithms use the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) technique to sample the six-dimensional translational and rotational space. Scoring functions including shape complementarity, electrostatics, and desolvation are usually exploited in ranking the docking conformations. While these rigid-body docking methods provide good performance in bound docking, us...

Docking to the plasma membrane prepares vesicles for rapid release. Here, we describe a mechanism for dense core vesicle docking in neurons. In Caenorhabditis elegans motor neurons, dense core vesicles dock at the plasma membrane but are excluded from active zones at synapses. We have found that the calcium-activated protein for secretion (CAPS) protein is required for dense core vesicle dockin...

introduction:  stereotactic  radiosurgery  is  a  technique  for  the  treatment  of  intracranial  lesions  with  highly  collimated  x-ray  beam.  linac-based  radiosurgery  is  currently  performed  by  two  techniques:  couch or pedestal mounted. in the first technique, a device is required to affix patient's head to a couch  and  moreover  to  translate  it  accurately.  structure  of...

effects of partial docking on feedlot performance and body fat characteristics were studied in a fat-tailed sheep breed. thirty-eight male lambs with an average weight of 4.44 ± 0.48 were randomly divided into two groups. the lambs in one group were partially docked at 3-4 h after birth, using rubber rings, and the lambs in another group remained intact (control). after weaning, 20 male lambs f...

modeling and simulation techniques are now widely used alongside with their experimental counterparts in order to complement them, or sometimes to bring first insights into the possible outcome of experiments. “modeling” is a general word that could encompass a wide range of methods that could be applied to a variety of subjects and problems. here, the use of selected molecular modeling methods...

the aim of the study was to investigate the effect of tail-docking on the lh pulse frequency in femaletuj lambs. twelve female lambs were assigned into two equal groups. a rubber ring was applied to the baseof the tail for shedding off. blood samples were collected for 8 h in the 4th and 8th months of age todetermine pulsatile secretion of lh. starting from the age of 6 months, blood samples we...