In chemistry, dimerization refers to the process of joining two molecular entities by bonds. The resulting bonds can be either strong or weak. Many symmetrical chemical species are described as dimers, even when the monomer is unknown or highly unstable.
Nalin Chandra Wickramasinghe is a Sri Lankan-born British mathematician, astronomer and astrobiologist of Sinhalese ethnicity. His research interests include the interstellar medium, infrared astronomy, light scattering theory, applications of solid-state physics to astronomy, the early Solar System, comets, astrochemistry, the origin of life and astrobiology. A student and collaborator of Fred Hoyle, the pair worked jointly for over 40 years as influential proponents of panspermia. In 1974 they proposed the hypothesis that some dust in interstellar space was largely organic, later proven to be correct.
The optic vesicles project toward the sides of the head, and the peripheral part of each expands to form a hollow bulb, while the proximal part remains narrow and constitutes the optic stalk.
The eyes begin to develop as a pair of diverticula (pouches) from the lateral aspects of the forebrain. These diverticula make their appearance before the closure of the anterior end of the neural tube; after the closure of the tube around the 4th week of development, they are known as the optic vesicles. Previous studies of optic vesicles suggest that the surrounding extraocular tissues – the surface ectoderm and extraocular mesenchyme – are necessary for normal eye growth and differentiation.
Denis Noble is a British physiologist and biologist who held the Burdon Sanderson Chair of Cardiovascular Physiology at the University of Oxford from 1984 to 2004 and was appointed Professor Emeritus and co-Director of Computational Physiology. He is one of the pioneers of systems biology and developed the first viable mathematical model of the working heart in 1960. Noble established The Third Way of Evolution (TWE) project with James A. Shapiro which predicts that the entire framework of the modern synthesis will be replaced.
Marianne Grunberg-Manago was a Soviet-born French biochemist. Her work helped make possible key discoveries about the nature of the genetic code. Grunberg-Manago was the first woman to lead the International Union of Biochemistry and the 400-year-old French Academy of Sciences.
C-DNA, also known as C-form DNA, is one of many possible double helical conformations of DNA. DNA can be induced to take this form in particular conditions such as relatively low humidity and the presence of certain ions, such as Li+ or Mg2+, but C-form DNA is not very stable and does not occur naturally in living organisms. In 1961, it was found by Marvin, when he tried to repeat for the Li salt the higher water content pattern of the Na salt. What Marvin found is the semicrystalline C-DNA. "Semicrystalline" describes a diffraction pattern for which crystalline reflexions are seen at low resolution but continuous transform at higher resolution.
Proteins are generally thought to adopt unique structures determined by their amino acid sequences. However, proteins are not strictly static objects, but rather populate ensembles of conformations. Transitions between these states occur on a variety of length scales and time scales , and have been linked to functionally relevant phenomena such as allosteric signaling and enzyme catalysis.
Professor Nils Gunnar Hansson von Heijne, born 10 June 1951 in Gothenburg, is a Swedish scientist working on signal peptides, membrane proteins and bioinformatics at the Stockholm Center for Biomembrane Research at Stockholm University.
Late embryogenesis abundant proteins are proteins in plants, and some bacteria and invertebrates, that protect against protein aggregation due to desiccation or osmotic stresses associated with low temperature. LEA proteins were initially discovered accumulating late in embryogenesis of cotton seeds. Although abundant in seeds and pollens, LEA proteins have been found to protect against desiccation, cold, or high salinity in a variety of organisms, including the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans, nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, Artemia, and rotifers.
Bioelectrodynamics is a branch of medical physics and bioelectromagnetism which deals with rapidly changing electric and magnetic fields in biological systems, i.e. high frequency endogenous electromagnetic phenomena in living cells. Unlike the events studied by the electrophysiology, the generating mechanism of bioelectrodynamic phenomenon is not connected with currents of ions and its frequency is typically much higher. Examples include vibrations of electrically polar intracellular structures and non-thermal emission of photons as a result of metabolic activity.
Perry Sink Marshall is an American business consultant, and author of books on marketing, business strategy, communications technology, and evolution.
EPD is a biological database and web resource of eukaryotic RNA polymerase II promoters with experimentally defined transcription start sites. Originally, EPD was a manually curated resource relying on transcript mapping experiments targeted at individual genes and published in academic journals. More recently, automatically generated promoter collections derived from electronically distributed high-throughput data produced with the CAGE or TSS-Seq protocols were added as part of a special subsection named EPDnew. The EPD web server offers additional services, including an entry viewer which enables users to explore the genomic context of a promoter in a UCSC Genome Browser window, and direct links for uploading EPD-derived promoter subsets to associated web-based promoter analysis tools of the Signal Search Analysis (SSA) and ChIP-Seq servers. EPD also features a collection of position weight matrices (PWMs) for common promoter sequence motifs.
Sujata Sharma is an Indian structural biologist, biophysicist, writer and a professor at the Department of Biophysics of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi. She is known for her studies in the fields of protein structure, drug design and drug resistance of bacteria. Her studies have been documented by way of a number of articles and ResearchGate, an online repository of scientific articles has listed 167 of them. She is also the author of the books, "Warriors in White", an autobiographical account of some COVID-19 Warriors at All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi and other leading hospitals of India, including Prof Randeep Guleria, using a combination of modern medicine, astronomy and Vedic astrology, "The Secret of the Red Crystals", an autobiographical account of her days in AIIMS Delhi. and "A Dragonfly's purpose", which is an autobiographical account of her recovery from an autoimmune disease, Guillain Barre Syndrome. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded her the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, one of the highest Indian science awards, for her contributions to biosciences, in 2011. She is also a recipient of the Woman Scientist Award of the Biotech Research Society of India and the National Young Woman Bioscientist Award of the Department of Biotechnology which she received in 2006 and 2007 respectively. In 2020, she was awarded the Kalpana Chawla Excellence award, for her contributions in science. This award is instituted in the memory of the first Indian woman astronaut, Kalpana Chawla to go on space missions.
Susan Jones is a British computational biologist and bioinformatics group leader at the James Hutton Institute. Her work is specially focused on plant pathogen diagnostics, particularly virus diagnostics, using large datasets of RNA-Seq data. She also works on functional genomics, transcription regulation, protein-protein and protein-nucleic-acid interactions.,
Marta Cecilia del Carmen Bunster Balocchi is a Chilean scientist, most noted for her work in the fields of biochemistry, biophysics and crystallography. She is also known as one of the main promoters of bioinformatics in her country.
Dario DiFrancesco is a Professor Emeritus (Physiology) at the University of Milano. In 1979, he and collaborators discovered the so-called "funny" current in cardiac pacemaker cells, a new mechanism involved in the generation of cardiac spontaneous activity and autonomic regulation of heart rate. That initiated a new field of research in the heart and brain, where hyperpolarization-activated, cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channels, the molecular components of "funny" channels cloned in the late 90's, are today known to play fundamental roles in health and disease. Clinically relevant exploitation of the properties of "funny" channels has developed a channel blocker with specific heart rate-slowing action, ivabradine, marketed for the therapy of coronary artery disease, heart failure and the symptomatic treatment of chronic stable angina.
David Ross Brillinger is a statistician and Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his PhD from Princeton in 1961 under John Tukey. Brillinger's former doctoral students include Peter Guttorp, Ross Ihaka, Rafael Irizarry and Victor Panaretos.
Peter Kohl FAHA FHRS FTPS FIUPS is a scientist specializing in integrative cardiac research. He studies heterocellular electrophysiological interactions in cardiac tissue, myocardial structure-function relationships using 'wet' and 'dry' lab models, and mechano-electrical autoregulation of the heart.
The CmERG1 toxin is a peptide composed of 42 amino acids, found in venom from the Colombian scorpion Centruroides margaritatus. It blocks human ether-a-go-go-Related gene (hERG) potassium channels, which are important for cardiac action potential repolarization.
