All proteins sample a range of conformations at physiologic temperatures and this inherent flexibility enables them to carry out their prescribed functions. A comprehensive understanding of protein function therefore entails a characterization of protein flexibility. Here we describe a novel approach for quantifying a protein's flexibility in solution using small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) d...

Original SPE manuscript received for review 10 November 2008. Revised manuscript received 24 December 2008. Paper SPE 122710 peer approved 3 January 2009. Summary This paper presents an integrated method for identifying and inserting valuable flexibility into major projects. It builds upon recent work that (1) documents how errors in estimates can bias the selection of design concepts, (2) show...

Understanding mechanisms of protein flexibility is of great importance to structural biology. The ability to detect similarities between proteins and their patterns is vital in discovering new information about unknown protein functions. A Distance Constraint Model (DCM) provides a means to generate a variety of flexibility measures based on a given protein structure. Although information about...

Agile approaches to software development provide flexibility within the method, but provide little or no flexibility to support software process improvement (SPI). This second kind of flexibility is important to permit organizations to improve with time. To accomplish such improvement, a method-engineering approach is shown here to be useful. Examples of the application of method engineering to...

A fi rewall is a collection of components interposed between two networks that fi lter traffi c between them according to some security policy [1]. Typically, fi rewalls rely on restrictions in the network topology to perform this fi ltering. One key assumption under this model is that everyone on the protected network(s) is trusted, since internal traffi c is not seen by the fi rewall and thus...

By blending storytelling with topics in biology, a fun activity can be created for students to strengthen their scientific knowledge (1-3). The “Sci-Fi Microbe” writing assignment lets students create an altered version of a known microorganism, and write a story describing an unusual observation that leads the characters discovery of their new microorganism. The Sci-Fi Microbe exercise is appr...