Sub-Micellar Concentration of Sodium Dodecyl Sulphate Prevents Thermal Denaturation Induced Aggregation of Plant Lectin,Jacalin

The irreversible thermal unfolding of jacalin, the lectin purified from jackfruit seeds was accompanied by aggregation, where intermolecular interactions among the subunits are favoured over intramolecular interactions. The extent of aggregation increased as a function of temperature, time and protein concentration. The anionic surfactant, sodium dodecyl sulphate (SDS) significantly suppressed the formation of aggregates as observed by turbidity measurements and Rayleigh scattering assay. Moreover, far UV-CD spectra indicate that the protein β sheet transforms into α helical structure, when denatured in the presence of 3 mM SDS. Further, jacalin when heated in the presence of SDS partially retained the hemagglutination activity when jacalin-SDS mixture was diluted to 1:8 factor since 3 mM SDS was found to lyse the red blood cells. Thus, SDS only altered the aggregation behaviour of jacalin by preventing intermolecular hydrogen bonding among the exposed residues but did not completely stabilize the native conformation.     

Analysis of neutron distance data

Techniques are described for processing neutron distance data for the purpose of deriving information about the three-dimensional organization of macromolecular assemblies.     

Protein phosphorylation in human peripheral nerve: Altered phosphorylation of a 25-kDa glycoprotein in leprosy

Protein phosphorylation in a low speed supernatant of human peripheral nerve (tibial and sural) homogenate was investigated. The major phosphorylated proteins had molecular mass in the range of 70, 55, 45, and 25 kDa. Mg²⁺ or Mn²⁺ was essential for maximum phosphorylation although Zn²⁺, Co²⁺, and Ca²⁺, could partially support phosphorylation. External protein substrates casein and histone were also phosphorylated. The protein phosphatase inhibitor orthovanadate enhanced the phosphorylation of the 45 and 25 kDa proteins significantly. Concanavalin A-Sepharose chromatography of the phosphorylated peripheral nerve proteins showed that the 25 kDa protein was a glycoprotein. Protein phosphorylation of peripheral nerves from leprosy affected individuals was compared with normals. The phosphorylation of 25 kDa protein was decreased in most of the patients with leprosy.     

Unsupervised Spatial Event Detection in Targeted Domains with Applications to Civil Unrest Modeling

Twitter has become a popular data source as a surrogate for monitoring and detecting events. Targeted domains such as crime, election, and social unrest require the creation of algorithms capable of detecting events pertinent to these domains. Due to the unstructured language, short-length messages, dynamics, and heterogeneity typical of Twitter data streams, it is technically difficult and labor-intensive to develop and maintain supervised learning systems. We present a novel unsupervised approach for detecting spatial events in targeted domains and illustrate this approach using one specific domain, viz. civil unrest modeling. Given a targeted domain, we propose a dynamic query expansion algorithm to iteratively expand domain-related terms, and generate a tweet homogeneous graph. An anomaly identification method is utilized to detect spatial events over this graph by jointly maximizing local modularity and spatial scan statistics. Extensive experiments conducted in 10 Latin American countries demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.     

Properties and characteristics of an anti-human chorionic gonadotropin monoclonal antibody

The product of a hybrid cell clone, P₃W₈₀, obtained as ascites fluid from mouse peritoneal cavity had high titres of anti-human chorionic gonadotropin antibodies e.g. 30 to 40% binding of¹²⁵I-human chorionic gonadotropin at 10⁷ dilution in a radioimmunoassay. The antiserum SB₆ (raised against Β-human chorionic gonadotropin distributed by National Institutes of Health, USA gave similar binding at 5000 dilution in parallel runs. The monoclonal antibody recognized best human chorionic gonadotropin (0.3 mlU of hormone/tube withB/B ₀ 75%), but also bound Β and a subunits of human chorionic gonadotropin, 12 and 800 folds lower than human chorionic gonadotropin respectively No binding was observed with carboxy terminal peptides of Β-human chorionic gonadotropin ranging from 93 to 145 amino acid residues, indicating the lack of recognition of the C-terminal region. No cross-reaction with human leutinizing hormone was obtained at the physiological surge levels, a significant competition (B/B ₀75 %. obtainable only at 60 mlU of LER 960 human leutinizing hormone/ tube. The antibody had heavy chain of IgG₁ and light chain of kappa type. It neutralized the bio-activity of human chorionic gonadotropin bothin vitro and invivo.     

Are shed hair genomes the most effective noninvasive resource for estimating relationships in the wild?

1. Knowledge of relationships in wild populations is critical for better understanding mating systems and inbreeding scenarios to inform conservation strategies for endangered species. To delineate pedigrees in wild populations, study genetic connectivity, study genotype‐phenotype associations, trace individuals, or track wildlife trade, many identified individuals need to be genotyped at thousands of loci, mostly from noninvasive samples. This requires us to (a) identify the most common noninvasive sample available from identified individuals, (b) assess the ability to acquire genome‐wide data from such samples, and (c) evaluate the quality of such genome‐wide data, and its ability to reconstruct relationships between animals within a population.
2. We followed identified individuals from a wild endangered tiger population and found that shed hair samples were the most common compared to scat samples, opportunistically found carcasses, and opportunistic invasive samples. We extracted DNA from these samples, prepared whole genome sequencing libraries, and sequenced genomes from these.
3. Whole genome sequencing methods resulted in between 25%–98% of the genome sequenced for five such samples. Exploratory population genetic analyses revealed that these data were free of holistic biases and could recover expected population structure and relatedness. Mitochondrial genomes recovered matrilineages in accordance with long‐term monitoring data. Even with just five samples, we were able to uncover the matrilineage for three individuals with unknown ancestry.
4. In summary, we demonstrated that noninvasive shed hair samples yield adequate quality and quantity of DNA in conjunction with sensitive library preparation methods, and provide reliable data from hundreds of thousands of SNPs across the genome. This makes shed hair an ideal noninvasive resource for studying individual‐based genetics of elusive endangered species in the wild.