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Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
Integrin signaling is critical for many biological functions including cell survival, cell migration, development, immunity and wound healing. Integrins perform their function through a structural change that is propagated from the...
This dissertation attempts to provide insight into the mixing, hydration and annealing of self-assembled, multilayered films based on precise counting of their doping ions and water content. Several practical applications are then...
Large-volume protein crystals are a prerequisite for neutron diffraction studies and their production represents a bottleneck in obtaining neutron structures. Many protein crystals that permit the collection of high-resolution X-ray...
Small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) are localized in the nucleolus as small ribonucleoprotein particle (snoRNP) that are RNA-protein complexes and catalyze site specific modifications on the ribosomal RNA. When compared to many protein...
Diphtheria toxin repressor is a regulatory protein from Corynebacterium diphtheriae, the causal agent of Diphtheria. The diphtheria toxin repressor (DtxR) contains an SH3-like domain that forms an intramolecular complex with a proline...
Muscle contraction is regulated at the thin filament level by tropomyosin (Tm) and the troponin complex (Tn). Tm is an α-helical coiled coil protein that forms a continuous strand on the actin filament through end-end interactions with...
Tissue engineering is one of the fastest growing biotechnology industries. The overarching research goals of the tissue engineering industry are highly intertwined with the field of medicine. The tissue engineering field seeks to create...
All functional RNAs contain post-transcriptionally modified nucleotides. 2'-O-ribose methylation and pseudouridylation are the two major types of modifications, which occur by box C/D and box H/ACA ribonucleoprotein (RNP) complexes, ...
Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) offer an adaptive immune system that protects bacteria and archaea from nucleic acid invaders through an RNA-mediated nucleic acid cleavage mechanism. Our knowledge of...
Fibroblast growth factor-1 (FGF-1) is an angiogenic factor with therapeutic potential for the treatment of ischemic disease. FGF-1 has low intrinsic thermostability and is characteristically formulated with heparin as a stabilizing agent...
This dissertation presents studies by magnetization, dc magnetic susceptibility and EPR spectroscopy on several new spin-frustrated polyoxometalate (POM) lattices of increasing spin sizes and complexities. Measurements have been made...
One of the primary contributors to protein structure and functioning in biological systems is the electrostatic environment experienced by the protein. This environment is caused by charged and polar chemical interactions, with the...
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease currently affecting about five million Americans. The devastating impact of Alzheimer's disease and the growing cost of the disease make it an emerging public health problem causing...
Small helical membrane proteins are functionally very important. They are involved in many cellular transport and signal transduction pathways maintaining the chemical, mechanical and electrical potentials of cells. They constitute...
The scope of this dissertation is two-fold: assembly of histidine-tagged peptides and proteins directly to the surface of a 1.5 nm AuNP and the assembly and delivery of nano-medical materials for MR imaging and gene therapy. Chapter 1 is...
Myosin activity and actomyosin interaction play key roles in normal and pathological cardiac muscle contraction. Factors that modulate actomyosin have the potential to exert changes in cardiac contraction that may be necessary for normal...
Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs), a family of enzymes known for their proteolytic activities on processing extracellular matrix substrates, may play an integral role in blood-brain barrier opening following an ischemic stroke. Several...
Structural biology has been successful in the characterization of soluble protein, which has given insight in the inner working of several thousands of proteins. However, structural characterization of proteins has been limited in two...
Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) regulates an array of physiological functions and acts as a second messenger at low levels. However, the elevation of these levels can lead to oxidative stress, a state that is implicated in the progression of...
A critical consideration in the process of de novo protein architecture design and protein evolution is the folding pathway and behavior a protein undertakes in transitioning to its functional tertiary structure. Of particular interest...
Determining the Solution Conformational Entropy of Oligosaccharides: Isolating the Effects of Anomeric Configuration, Glycosidic Linkage, Degree of Polymerization, Linearity versus Cyclicity and Hydrogen Bonding
Oligosaccharides have various fundamental roles, ranging from providing nutritional and flavoring support to being involved in fertilization and parasite infection processes. Maltooligosaccharides are used heavily in the food and...
Scientists have used computers to model a plethora of systems since the rise of the computer age. The most common use of modeling is to analyze an existing system. With a complete model of an existing system the parameters can be changed...
Muscle generates force through the interaction between myosin cross-bridges and actin filaments. This study is part of a research project that aims to understand the molecular mechanism of force production through direct visualization of...
Biogenesis of eukaryotic ribosomes is a complicated process that needs to be highly coordinated and tightly regulated. The small nucleolar ribonucleoprotein particles (snoRNPs) mediate the first step of ribosome biogenesis by carrying...
The orthogonal space tempering (OST) scheme is a robust and high-order generalized ensemble sampling method that can make sampling in MD simulation much more efficiently and recover the desired thermodynamic properties of interest in...
Living systems consist of several complex interacting components. Depending on the complexity of the organism, these components can span from molecules to tissues and organs. Systems biology is the interdisciplinary field of study that...
The structure of human acidic fibroblast growth factor (FGF-1) is classified a b-trefoil structure, one of the fundamental protein superfolds. The x-ray crystal structures of wild type and various mutants of FGF-1 have been solved in...
The naturally occurring enediynes are compounds with astonishingly high biological activity, based upon their ability to generate DNA-damaging reactive species. In an effort to find a photochemical way for enediyne activation, the...
BACKGROUND: Kallikrein 6 (KLK6) is a newly identified member of the kallikrein family of secreted serine proteases that prior studies indicate is elevated at sites of central nervous system (CNS) inflammation and which shows regulated...
The development and experimental validation of a mathematical model for nanoparticle–based surface energy transfer (SET) between gold nanoparticles and fluorescent dye labels, has enabled biophysical studies of nucleic acid structure and...
The Morita-Baylis-Hillman reaction dates back to German and Japanese patents where both Morita, and Baylis and Hillman, discovered a new carbon-carbon bond forming reaction involving a nucleophilic catalyst, an activated alkene, and an...
The interest in cryo-electron microscopy has been reinvigorated by the recent introduction of direct electron detectors and the development of new software. Images of frozen proteins can now be collected with significantly higher signal...
The Michael addition of lithium enolates to α, β unsaturated esters is considered to be one of the powerful and widely used C-C bond forming methods in organic synthesis. We investigated the Michael addition of lithium propionate enolates...
Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) are a family of metzincin enzymes that act as the principle regulators and remodelers of the extracellular matrix (ECM). While MMPs are involved in many normal biological processes, unregulated MMP...
We describe a cryo-electron microscopy 3D image reconstruction of relaxed myosin II-containing thick filaments from the flight muscle of the giant waterbug Lethocerus indicus. The relaxed thick filament structure is a key element of...
Petroleomics: Applications in the Fingerprinting of the Acidic and Basic Crude Oil Components Detected by Electrospray Ionization Fourier Transform Ion Cyclotron Resonance Mass Spectrometry
We have previously demonstrated the ability of electrospray ionization Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (ESI FT-ICR MS) to resolve and identify the polar species found in all petroleum distillates. The...
An attempt has been made to improve a crystal contact of human acidic fibroblast growth factor (haFGF; 140 amino acids) to control the crystal growth, because haFGF crystallizes only as a thin-plate form, yielding crystals suitable for X...
Part I: Isocratic and Gradient Elution Reversed-Phase Liquid Chromatography for the Estimation of the Hydrophobicity Parameter Log K'W: Applications to Newer Generation Stationary Phases. Part II: Planar Electrochromatographic Instrumental Design and Results
The first half of this dissertation (Chapters 1-3) will discuss reversed-phase liquid chromatographic (RPLC) estimations of hydrophobicity. The RPLC retention values in purely aqueous mobile phases are used as measures of hydrophobicity....
This dissertation presents the concept, development, and characterization of a new methodology for both qualitative and quantitative analysis of protein digests in solution. Two beam fluorescence cross correlation spectroscopy is used to...
The performance of a material is often dictated by surface and interfacial properties such as wettability, friction and adhesion. The ability to modify the wetting properties of surfaces by using self assembled polyelectrolyte...
Semiconductor nanostructures have shown great potential for detecting and measuring chemical and biological interactions. The advantage of the electrically based schemes is real-time, label-free detection, which had been absent from...
This dissertation presents EPR spectroscopic, dc magnetic susceptibility, and thermo-magnetic studies of three spin S = 1 systems. This work is primarily focused on the complexes [(CH3CN)5VOV(CH3CN)][BF4]4, Cr(C4H13N3)((O2)2.H2O and Cr...
Electrophoresis as an analytical technique has made considerable contributions to the separations and analysis of macromolecules in biology-related research. Pluronic gels, which are composed of orderly packed spherical micelles...
Fibroblast growth factor-1 (FGF-1) is an angiogenic factor with therapeutic potential for the treatment of ischemic disease. FGF-1 has low intrinsic thermostability and is characteristically formulated with heparin as a stabilizing agent...
Assimilatory NADPH-dependent sulfite reductase (SiR) is the enzyme responsible for the six-electron reduction of sulfite to sulfide. In Enterobacteria, SiR is a dodecameric complex with two subunits: an octameric flavin-containing SiRFP, ...
The Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat loci found in most archaea and some bacteria contain DNA sequences (spacers) that originate from genetic invaders like viruses, transposons, and plasmids. The CRISPR clusters...
Thy-1 is being pursued as a model system for NMR studies of structure and dynamics of intact glycoproteins. However, the low expression yield of the Thy-1 EGFP glycoprotein in insect and mammalian cells has been an obstacle for these...
The works discussed within this dissertation explore two major considerations. The first of which explores key structural conformations within the branch site helix that are critical for ribonucleic acid (RNA) splicing. The branch site...
Vesicle transport is an essential function for eukaryotes in the transfer of molecular cargo throughout the cell. Studying the formation of vesicles is key in understanding eukaryotic cell biology. Coat Protein Complex II facilitates...
Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
