Although it is reasonable to expect that the frequency of a generic dipeptide XY in proteins is the same of its counterpart YX, on the basis of an accurate statistical analysis of a large number of protein sequences, it appears…

Cryo-Electron Microscopy (EM) is a powerful technique to visualize biological processes at nanometer resolution. Structural studies of macromolecular assemblies are typically performed on individual complexes that are biochemically isolated from their cellular context.  Here we present a molecular imaging platform…

Numerous bioactive natural products are synthesised by modular polyketide synthases. These compounds can be made in high yield by native multienzyme assembly lines. In contrast, formation of analogues by genetically engineered systems is often considerably less efficient. Biochemical studies on…

Modern methods of cryo electron microscopy and tomography allow visualization of protein nanomachines in their native state at the nanometer scale. Image processing methods including sub-volume averaging applied to repeating macromolecular elements within tomograms allow exploring their structures within the…

Error analysis plays a fundamental role in describing the uncertainty in experimental results.  It has several fundamental uses in metabolomics including experimental design, quality control of experiments, the selection of appropriate statistical methods, and the determination of uncertainty in results. …

Mass spectrometry coupled to gas chromatography (GC-MS) has been widely applied in the field of metabolomics. Success of this application has benefited greatly from computational workflows that process the complex raw mass spectrometry data and extract the qualitative and quantitative…

The development of new high-throughput sequencing technologies has increased dramatically the number of successful genomic projects. Thus, draft genomic sequences of more than 60 plant species are currently available. Suitable bioinformatics tools are being developed to assemble, annotate and analyze…

Non-covalent interactions of aromatics are important in a wide range of chemical and biological applications. The past two decades have seen numerous reports of arene-arene binding being understood in terms Hammett substituent constants, and similar analyses have recently been extended…

Antifoams are often added to bioprocesses with little knowledge of their impact on the cells or product. However, it is known that certain antifoams can affect the growth rates of both prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms in addition to changing surface…

Liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) is highly sensitive, selective, and enables extensive detection of metabolites within a sample. The result allows us to characterize comprehensive metabolite accumulation patterns without dependence on authentic standard compounds and isolation of the individual metabolites.…