1,721,028 research outputs found
Editorial: Usefulness and robustness of In Silico and experimental technology for drug discovery
No full textContrary to the previous issues on "Pharmacophore Elucidation & their use in Drugs & Design: Experimental Structures, Conformational Analysis and 3D QSAR", mostly with a computational character we decided to move a bit and invite scientists who use approaches where the conformational problem was not the end point but lies in the black box of a more wider context finally leading to the “drug”.
Ideally the issue can be viewed as a kind of drug design cycle where some approaches are employed that do not exclude but can mutually complement each other.
The article by Edward Zartler et al. on “Protein NMR as a screening tool in drug discovery” integrates well with both by A. Goldblum et al. on “Computational protein design” and by Walter Huber et al., which reviews on the state of art of the Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) technology.
Advances in protein manipulation, whether by biological means (labelling) or physical means (NMR), has become prominent within the past ten years and has created a powerful method which is able to observe ligand-target interactions in solution. Protein based NMR methods have the advantage of supplying detailed structural information in addition to readout of binding events. Computational protein design has emerged in recent years as a field that could make a substantial impact on the design of protein drugs.
Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) technology has widespread applications in many fields of the drug discovery process. Protein/protein interactions can be monitored in real time when working with biopharmaceuticals as well as protein/small analyte interactions during hit finding, secondary screening, lead optimization and lead selection. Equilibrium binding constants, kinetic rate constants and thermodynamic parameters are obtained from such studies that help to understand the mechanism of the binding reactions. This information can be directly used to improve binding.
The final “last but not least” article by Gloria Uccello Baretta et al. points out the role of chirality with respect to the therapeutical and regulatory effects of pharmaceutical products that has led to a growing demand for reliable direct methods for monitoring stereoisomeric products. The analysis of enantiorecognition processes involves the detection of enantiomeric species as well as the study of chiral discrimination mechanisms. In both fields Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy plays a fundamental role, providing several tools, based on the use of suitable chiral auxiliaries, for observing distinct signals of enantiomers and for investigating the complexation phenomena involved in enantiodiscrimination processes
Pyrimido[5,4-b]indole derivatives. 1. A new class of potent and selective alpha 1 adrenoceptor ligands.
No full textGoing Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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