Biological macromolecules, origins

Another distinction should be made (independently of the fluorescence aspects) between chemical sensors (also called chemosensors) and biosensors. In the former, the analyte-responsive moiety is of abiotic origin, whereas it is a biological macromolecule (e.g. protein) in the latter. 

The origin of life probably occurred in three phases (fig. 1.23) (1) The earliest phase was a period of chemical evolution during which the compounds needed for the nu-cleation of life must have been formed. These compounds include the most important class of biological macromolecules, the nucleic acids. In this phase of evolution, the synthesis of nucleic acids was noninstructed. (2) As soon as some nucleic acids were present, physical forces between them must have led to an instructed synthesis, in which the already formed molecules served as templates for the synthesis of new polymers. It seems likely that feedback loops selected out certain nucleic acids for preferential synthesis. At some point during this period of instructed synthesis more nucleic acids and possibly protein macromolecules were formed. The products of this phase of mo-... 

Hofmeister series — The Hofmeister series (HS) originates from the ranking of anions and cations toward their ability to precipitate a mixture of hen egg white proteins [i]. This protein precipitation can be explained simply in terms of the extent of ions binding to water (i.e., as a salting-out effect). The HS has been shown to have a much more general utility with a broad range of biophysical phenomena, which include the stability and crystallization of biological macromolecules, enzyme activity, DNA-protein interactions, etc. The traditional and extended HS [ii] is shown as... 

Eigen has also been interested in the chemical basis of the origin of life, which seems to be a very different question from his previous studies, in reality it is not. Two of his papers were named Citation Classics by Current Contents. One paper was Proton-transfer, acid-base catalysis, and enzymatic hydrolysis. Part I elementary processes. An ew. Chem. 1963, 75, 489 Int. Ed. En l. 1964, 5, 1-19. It was one of the most cited papers in the field. The German and the English versions have been cited more than 285 and 965 times, respectively, by 1990. Then Eigen worked on evolution and published another paper, Self-organization of matter and the evolution of biological macromolecules. Naturwissenschafien 1971, 58, 465-523. This paper was the most cited paper in that journal in over 490 publications by 1990. 

Abstract An original scoring function dedicated to the docking of biological macromolecules... 

The PDB [7] covers biological macromolecules (proteins and nucleic acids) for which crystallographic results have been directly deposited with the compilers. The database currently contains 655 entries. Applications software is not distributed with the PDB. However, the data bank has been recast in a variety of forms for search and retrieval purposes [8,9]. Many molecular modelling systems (both commercial and academic in origin) can also read the PDB format. The database is compiled at the Department of Chemistry, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973, USA. 

It is not the aim of this section to introduce the reader to all the areas listed above. Our goal is modest. We describe some of the theoretical developments which arose from studies of caricatures of proteins. Such models were designed in order to imderstand certain general features about protein structures and how these are kinetically reached. To keep the bibliography compact we mostly cite review articles. The interested reader can find the original papers in these cited works. We hope that this short introduction will entice the reader to delve into the ever surprising world of biological macromolecules. 

As described in Section 3, iron can promote peroxidation of biological macromolecules due to its reactions with ROS and, thus, is of high toxic potential for cells, if it is not kept in a toxicologi-cally inactivated form bound to specific proteins. Only when iron is tightly bound to a chelator is its capacity for promoting LPO minimal. Amongst synthetic chelators of iron, fois-(2-aminoethyl)-amine-A, N,A, N -penta-acetic acid, desferrioxamine, o-phenanthroline and bathophenanthroline are able to complex Fe + and, thus, slow down reduction of Fe to Fe + by reductants like ascorbic acid or (O2) in vitro, but EDTA is ineffective. Desferrioxamine was originally developed for the treatment of iron overload disease because it binds Fe +... 

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