We present a general strategy for designing proteins to recognize DNA sequences and illustrate this with an example based on the "Y-shaped scissors grip" model for leucine-zipper gene-regulatory proteins. The designed protein is formed from two copies, in tandem, of the basic (DNA binding) region of v-Jun. These copies are coupled through a tripeptide to yield a "dimer" expected to recognize th...

In this paper, an analytical model for cutting process of a plate of material with a pair of scissors is presented. The cutting model predicts that, during task, force/torque responses of the scissors depend on the toughness and geometry of the plate. A force/position control law for a pair of scissors in contact with a partially known environment is proposed. The environment is a rigid plate o...

Algorithms for several emerging large-scale problems in cheminformatics have as their rate-limiting step the evaluation of relatively slow chemical similarity measures, such as structural similarity or three-dimensional (3-D) shape comparison. In this article we present SCISSORS, a linear-algebraical technique (related to multidimensional scaling and kernel principal components analysis) to rap...