Over three decades have passed since the discovery of HIV-1, yet an AIDS vaccine remains elusive. The envelope glycoprotein of HIV-1 gp120, is the most exposed protein on the viral surface and thus serves as an important ...

During the past decade the effects of macromolecular crowding on reaction pathways is gaining in prominence. The stress is to move out of the realms of ideal solution studies and make conceptual modifications that consider ...

This thesis set out to explore the conformational properties of short designed peptide sequences, in which transitions between structural states may be anticipated. The use of conformationally constrained residues like ...

Exonic sequences of eukaryotic genes are interspersed with introns which when accurately removed from the primary transcript (pre-mRNA) results in a functional transcript. These splicing reactions are carried out by the ...

Three-dimensional structures of proteins provide insights into the mechanisms of macromolecular assembly, enzyme catalysis and mode of activation, substrate-specificity, ligand-binding properties, stability and dynamical ...

The emergence of drug resistant strains of Plasmodium has given a new face to the old disease, malaria. One of the approaches is to block metabolic pathways of the pathogen. The current thesis describes the X-ray ...

Lectins, multivalent carbohydrate-binding proteins of non-immune origin, have the unique ability to decode the information contained in complex carbohydrate structures of glycoproteins and glycolipids by stereo-specifically ...

Disulfides are the primary covalent interactions within a protein molecule that connect residues which are sequentially distant. Naturally occurring disulfides enhance the stability of the protein by destabilization of ...