Posts by ideviate
Natural products
Natural products have been a major source of drugs for centuries. With more than 25% of the pharmaceuticals in use today from natural products. This can be attributed to several factors, including unmet therapeutic needs that drive drug discovery, the remarkable diversity of both chemical structures and biological activities of naturally occuring secondary metabolities and etc.
Prior to the early-mid 20th century, the use of natural products was limited pricipally to crude plant preparations and was based largely on empirical observation.
Surface plasmon resonance
At an interface between two transparent media of different refractive index (glass and water), light coming from the side of higher refractive index is partly reflected and partly refracted.
Above a certain critical angle of incidence, no light is refracted across the interface, and total internal reflection is observed. While incident light is totally reflected the electromagnetic field component penetrates a short (tens of nanometers) distance into a medium of a lower refractive index creating an exponentially detenuating evanescent wave. If the interface between the media is coated with a thin layer of metal (gold), and light is monochromatic and p-polarized, the intensity of the reflected light is reduced at a specific incident angle producing a sharp shadow (called surface plasmon resonance) due to the resonance energy transfer between evanescent wave and surface plasmons.
Plagiarism
Defining “Ethics”
“What is all this, and how does it work?” – the answers to which are sought by science; and “What should we do?” – the answers to which are given by ethics. Ethics is a bridge between science and the deliberate mind. With the word deliberate mind I mean, the mind which seeks answers, try to understand the good/evil, true/false, right/wrong, has sense of morality which seems to be an innate and defining characteristic of human beings. We have to exclude nihilists, anarchists or psychopaths who may not seek an answer at all.
According to Bernard Williams, theory of ethics can be defined as “a philosophical structure, which together with some degree of empirical fact, will yield a decision procedure for moral reasoning” or in a more simple way, we can say that, ethics seeks to answer the question “What should I do, all things considered?”[1]
Structure Visualization
It’s generally understood by the molecular biology research community that the sequencing of the human genome, which will likely take several more years to complete, is relatively trivial compared to definitively characterizing the interactions within the proteome.
Non-Static Structure Visualization
Unlike a nucleotide sequence, which is a relatively static structure, proteins are dynamic entities that change their shape and association with other molecules as a function of temperature, chemical interactions, pH, and other changes in the environment.
