The Protein Precursors of Peptides That Affect the Mechanics of Connective Tissue and/or Muscle in the Echinoderm Apostichopus japonicus

PMCID: PMC3432112This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Metric Structure of the Space of Two-Qubit Gates, Perfect Entanglers and Quantum Control

We derive expressions for the invariant length element and measure for the simple compact Lie group SU(4) in a coordinate system particularly suitable for treating entanglement in quantum information processing. Using this metric, we compute the invariant volume of the space of two-qubit perfect entanglers. We find that this volume corresponds to more than 84% of the total invariant volume of the space of two-qubit gates. This same metric is also used to determine the effective target sizes that selected gates will present in any quantum-control procedure designed to implement them.Comment: 27 pages, 5 figure

Inhibitors of Pyruvate Carboxylase

This review aims to discuss the varied types of inhibitors of biotin-dependent carboxylases, with an emphasis on the inhibitors of pyruvate carboxylase. Some of these inhibitors are physiologically relevant, in that they provide ways of regulating the cellular activities of the enzymes e.g. aspartate and prohibitin inhibition of pyruvate carboxylase. Most of the inhibitors that will be discussed have been used to probe various aspects of the structure and function of these enzymes. They target particular parts of the structure e.g. avidin – biotin, FTP – ATP binding site, oxamate – pyruvate binding site, phosphonoacetate – binding site of the putative carboxyphosphate intermediate

Who are the Jordanians? The Citizen-Subjects of Abdullah II

Who are the Jordanians? This dissertation approaches this question from the position of how: how is Jordanian citizenship thought of and practiced? As such this is not a study of national identity, but of citizenship. Al-sh’ab yureed…Much has been said about this clarion call which echoed in streets and squares across the Arab world in 2011/2012. Jordanians shared with their regional co-demonstrators a basis on which their claims, regardless of substantive differences, were made: citizenship. However actual examinations of citizenship since remain limited, beyond conceiving it as little more than a status of belonging. The thesis beyond is an investigation into the practice and theory of Jordanian citizenship. Divided into three parts and six chapters, the thesis makes several principal arguments. Part one: Citizens and Subjects? Theorising on History consists of the first three chapters. It establishes what I mean when speaking of a citizenship approach. It is advanced that citizenship’s historical pedigree in an Anglo-European context does not correlate with its Arabic counterparts. This becomes problematic when Anglo-European assumptions influence approaches to citizenship in the Arab world. Hence the need to elucidate the historical development of jinsiyyah and muwātanah. Third, this development is contextualised within Jordanian political history. The historical construction of Jordanian citizenship is situated in its contemporary context since the ascension of Abdullah II in 1999. Part two: Citizenship in Contemporary Jordan, containing chapters four, and five. Chapter four, making use of fieldwork conducted in Jordan uses contemporary reflections on citizenship from Jordanians as a lens through which the first decade of Abdullah II’s reign is analysed. A key characteristic of citizenship’s theory and practice is highlighted: the absence of accountability and ownership. The thesis then provides analysis of the 2011/2012 uprisings, situating them as a citizen search for ownership and accountability. Part three: Practices Within and Between Jinsiyyah and Muwātanah, is composed of chapters six, seven and eight, with a focus on contemporary affairs in the Jordan. Three areas: the gendering of citizenship, the politics of citizen expression and the intersections between tribalism and citizenship, are explored

Integration of Biological Sources: Exploring the Case of Protein Homology

Data integration is a key issue in the domain of bioin- formatics, which deals with huge amounts of heteroge- neous biological data that grows and changes rapidly. This paper serves as an introduction in the field of bioinformatics and the biological concepts it deals with, and an exploration of the integration problems a bioinformatics scientist faces. We examine ProGMap, an integrated protein homology system used by bioin- formatics scientists at Wageningen University, and several use cases related to protein homology. A key issue we identify is the huge manual effort required to unify source databases into a single resource. Un- certain databases are able to contain several possi- ble worlds, and it has been proposed that they can be used to significantly reduce initial integration efforts. We propose several directions for future work where uncertain databases can be applied to bioinformatics, with the goal of furthering the cause of bioinformatics integration