Candida albicans is one of the most prevalent fungal pathogens, causing both mucosal candidiasis and invasive candidemia. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), part of the human innate immune system, have been shown to exhibit antifungal activity but have not been effective as pharmaceuticals because of low activity and selectivity in physiologically relevant environments. Nevertheless, studies on α-p...

Microalgae have great potential to be a feedstock for producing biofuel. One of the major impediments towards the industrial-scale manufacturing of biofuel from microalgae is the ineffective separation of microalgae from water. In this communication, we first carried out froth flotation tests to harvest freshwater microalgae (Chlorella sp. BR2) and marine microalgae (Tetraselmis sp. M8) from di...

A precise representation of the spatial distribution of hydrophobicity, hydrophilicity and charges on the molecular surface of proteins is critical for the understanding of the interaction with small molecules and larger systems. The representation of hydrophobicity is rarely done at atom-level, as this property is generally assigned to residues. A new methodology for the derivation of atomic h...

Numerous sex-related morphological adaptations are connected to reproductive behavior in animals. For example, females of some insect species can submerge during oviposition, which may lead to sex-related adaptations in the hydrophobicity (water-repellency) due to specialization of certain morphological structures. On the other hand, ageing can cause changes in hydrophobicity of the surface, be...

OBJECTIVE To develop an efficient method for evaluating cell surface hydrophobicity and to apply the method to demonstrate the effects of fungal growth conditions on cell surface properties. METHODS Yeast isolates were suspended in phosphate-buffered saline and mixed with deep blue-dyed polystyrene microspheres. Flow cytometry was used to detect the degree of microsphere binding to yeast cell...

Hydrophobic interactions drive many important biomolecular self-assembly phenomena. However, characterizing hydrophobicity at the nanoscale has remained a challenge due to its nontrivial dependence on the chemistry and topography of biomolecular surfaces. Here we use molecular simulations coupled with enhanced sampling methods to systematically displace water molecules from the hydration shells...

Computational methods to predict proteinprotein interactions are becoming increasingly important. This is due to the fact that most of the interactions data have been identified by highthroughput technologies like the yeast two-hybrid system which are known to yield many false positives. In this paper we investigate the use of two protein sequence features, namely, domain structure and hydropho...

Lipid modifications provide efficient targeting of oligonucleotides to live cell membranes in a range of applications. Targeting efficiency is a function of the rate of lipid DNA insertion into the cell surface and its persistence over time. Here we show that increasing lipid hydrophobicity increases membrane persistence, but decreases the rate of membrane insertion due to the formation of nonp...

The influence of solute hydrophobicity and charge on partitioning and diffusion in physically crosslinked networks of a genetically engineered SELP polymer was investigated. A series of fluorescent dyes were used to assess the impact of solute charge and hydrophobicity on release behavior. The mechanism of solute release from the SELP hydrogel appeared to vary as a function of dye hydrophobicit...