Landau level bosonization of a 2D electron gas

In this work we introduce a bosonization scheme for the low energy excitations of a 2D interacting electron gas in the presence of an uniform magnetic field under conditions where a large integral number of Landau levels are filled. We give an explicit construction for the electron operator in terms of the bosons. We show that the elementary neutral excitations, known as the magnetic excitons or magnetoplasma modes, can be described within a bosonic language and that it provides a quadratic bosonic Hamiltonian for the interacting electron system which can be easily diagonalized.Comment: 4 pages, revte

QED radiative corrections for elastic e(mu)p scattering in hadronic variables

A numerical analysis of QED radiative corrections for elastic e(mu)p cattering in hadronic variables at energies of the current experiment at JLab is performed. The explicit formulas from the review of Akhundov et al. resulting from the integration over the phase space of leptonic variables plus photon are used to obtain the values of the cross sections and the radiative correction factor for unpolarized lepton-proton scattering. Our numerical results agree with the corresponding results arising from the formulas of Afanasev et al.Comment: 4 Pages, 4 figure

Evolutionary conservation of influenza A PB2 sequences reveals potential target sites for small molecule inhibitors.

The influenza A basic polymerase protein 2 (PB2) functions as part of a heterotrimer to replicate the viral RNA genome. To investigate novel PB2 antiviral target sites, this work identified evolutionary conserved regions across the PB2 protein sequence amongst all sub-types and hosts, as well as ligand binding hot spots which overlap with highly conserved areas. Fifteen binding sites were predicted in different PB2 domains; some of which reside in areas of unknown function. Virtual screening of ~50,000 drug-like compounds showed binding affinities of up to 10.3 kcal/mol. The highest affinity molecules were found to interact with conserved residues including Gln138, Gly222, Ile529, Asn540 and Thr530. A library containing 1738 FDA approved drugs were screened additionally and revealed Paliperidone as a top hit with a binding affinity of -10 kcal/mol. Predicted ligands are ideal leads for new antivirals as they were targeted to evolutionary conserved binding sites

Influenza A nucleoprotein binding sites for antivirals: current research and future potential

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Andreas Kukol and Hershna Patel, ‘Influenza A nucleoprotein binding sites for antivirals: current research and future potential’, Future Biology, Vol 9(7): 625-627, July 2014. The version of record is available online at doi: 10.2217/fvl.14.45Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Evaluation of a novel virtual screening strategy using receptor decoy binding sites

Virtual screening is used in biomedical research to predict the binding affinity of a large set of small organic molecules to protein receptor targets. This report shows the development and evaluation of a novel yet straightforward attempt to improve this ranking in receptor-based molecular docking using a receptor-decoy strategy. This strategy includes defining a decoy binding site on the receptor and adjusting the ranking of the true binding-site virtual screen based on the decoy-site screen. The results show that by docking against a receptor-decoy site with Autodock Vina, improved Receiver Operator Characteristic Enrichment (ROCE) was achieved for 5 out of fifteen receptor targets investigated, when up to 15 % of a decoy site rank list was considered. No improved enrichment was seen for 7 targets, while for 3 targets the ROCE was reduced. The extent to which this strategy can effectively improve ligand prediction is dependent on the target receptor investigated