Prp8 intein in fungal pathogens: target for potential antifungal drugs

AbstractInteins are self-splicing intervening sequences in proteins, and inteins of pathogenic organisms can be attractive drug targets. Here, we report an intein in important fungal pathogens including Aspergillus fumigatus, Aspergillus nidulans, Histoplasma capsulatum, and different serotypes of Cryptococcus neoformans. This intein is inside the extremely conserved and functionally essential Prp8 protein, and it varies in size from 170 aa in C. neoformans to 819 aa in A. fumigatus, which is caused by the presence or absence of an endonuclease domain and a putative tongs subdomain in the intein. Prp8 inteins of these organisms were demonstrated to do protein splicing in a recombinant protein in Escherichia coli. These findings revealed Prp8 inteins as attractive targets for potential antifungal drugs to be identified using existing selection and screening methods

Static/Dynamic Filtering for Mesh Geometry

The joint bilateral filter, which enables feature-preserving signal smoothing according to the structural information from a guidance, has been applied for various tasks in geometry processing. Existing methods either rely on a static guidance that may be inconsistent with the input and lead to unsatisfactory results, or a dynamic guidance that is automatically updated but sensitive to noises and outliers. Inspired by recent advances in image filtering, we propose a new geometry filtering technique called static/dynamic filter, which utilizes both static and dynamic guidances to achieve state-of-the-art results. The proposed filter is based on a nonlinear optimization that enforces smoothness of the signal while preserving variations that correspond to features of certain scales. We develop an efficient iterative solver for the problem, which unifies existing filters that are based on static or dynamic guidances. The filter can be applied to mesh face normals followed by vertex position update, to achieve scale-aware and feature-preserving filtering of mesh geometry. It also works well for other types of signals defined on mesh surfaces, such as texture colors. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed filter for various geometry processing applications such as mesh denoising, geometry feature enhancement, and texture color filtering