Humanity is facing a vast prevalence of neurodegenerative diseases, with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) being the most dominant, without efficacious drugs, and only few therapeutic targets identified. In this scenario, we aim to find molecular entities that modulate imidazoline I2 receptors (I2-IRs) have been pointed out as relevant in AD. work, explored structural modifications well-established I2-I...

In the deoxy ferrous state of histidine-ligated heme proteins, the iron-histidine band (νFe-His) has been assigned as a stretching mode that involves a two-body motion involving the iron and histidine combined with a minor amount of heme doming. An analogous Raman band, νFe-L has been observed in the proximal cavity mutant of H93G myoglobin where the Raman band of a series of nonnative axial li...

The CO-specific heme-based sensor CooA regulates the ability of Rhodospirillum rubrum to grow on CO as an energy source. Only CO triggers the conformational change of CooA essential for the protein to function as a transcriptional activator. A structurally informed mutagenesis, followed by an in vivo screening method, allowed the isolation of a series of novel CooA variants that show very subst...

X-ray K-absorption spectroscopic studies have been carried out on copper (II) mixed-ligand complexes with glutamic acid and aspartic acid as the primary ligands, where as water, pyridine, imidazole and benz-imidazole have been used as secondary ligands. Chemical shifts obtained from the X-ray absorption data have indicated that the glutamic acid complexes are more ionic as compared to their cor...

The structure of adenylate kinase from yeast ligated with the two-substrate-mimicking inhibitor Ap5A and Mg2+ has been refined to 1.96 A resolution. In addition, the refined structure of the same complex with a bound imidazole molecule replacing Mg2+ has been determined at 1.63 A. These structures indicate that replacing Mg2+ by imidazole disturbs the water structure and thus the complex. A com...

Zinc is an essential metal to life. This transition metal is a structural component of many proteins and is actively involved in the catalytic activity of cell enzymes. In either case, these zinc-containing proteins are metalloproteins. However, the amino acid residues that serve as ligands for metal coordination are not necessarily the same in structural proteins compared to enzymes. While cry...

A new series of 1H-4-substituted imidazole compounds were synthesized and identified as potent and selective histamine (HA) H3 receptor ligands. These ligands establish that HA H3 antagonists exhibit stereoselective and conformational preferences in their binding to the HA H3 receptor. Structure-activity relationships were determined in vitro by HA H3 receptor-binding affinities using [3H]Nalph...

In the last two decades, a number of chelate strategies have been proposed for the fac-[M(CO)3] + (M = Re, Tc) core in radiopharmaceutical applications. However, the development of new ligands/ complexes with improved function and in vivo performance has been limited in recent years. Expanding on our previous studies using the 2 + 1 labeling strategy, a series of bidentate ligands (neutral vs. ...