Studies on armed conflicts are among the traditional themes of international relations. This is an extremely complex research field, integrating a plethora of findings from international relations ...and social sciences, as well as natural sciences. International relations as a social science does not have at its disposal a universal and general theory that would enable it to predict with sufficient precision, i.e. at least with non-random probability, the origin of wars and understand their causes. Consolidating obtained findings into a homogenous and coherent framework can, however, be even more demanding. This work represents a contribution to ongoing academic discussion in major areas currently relevant to armed conflict research.
Since the end of the Cold War, several military reforms have been carried out in Germany so far and a new military transformation is in the process of preparation. Over the years, the definition of ...the Bundeswehr’s main missions has gradually shifted towards crisis management operations and the structure of the armed forces has accommodated to this shift. After the 2010-2011 reform, it was entirely evident that crisis management operations have become the main task of the armed forces. At present, German military policy places the main emphasis on “restoring the capacities” for collective defence. The strengthening of the expeditionary element in the German armed forces was made possible by the most efficient use of resources and investment inherited from the Cold War era and cutting capacities tailored to territorial defence. The author comes to the conclusion, that such policy is now evidently exhausted and is no longer sustainable - if German collective defence capacities are to be truly restored.
Since the German unification in 1990 and essential changes in the international security environment, researchers have been engaged in an important debate about the new role of Germany in the current ...world. Academic literature offers many theoretical approaches that enable to conceptualize this new role of Germany: from the theoretical perspective, the concept of civilian power, the concept of trading state and the concept of middle power are considered to be the most elaborated. In the first place, this publication aims to evaluate the German foreign and security policy between 1990 and 2013 in light of these theoretical approaches, to better understand this policy and transmit the findings in an understandable way to the broad public.
The article sums up the main ideas of Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of our Nature, and introduces main currents of its criticism. The currents are categorized; thereafter the strength of ...Pinker's opponents' arguments is evaluated. The conclusions points towards coherence and sound empirical foundation of the school of thought emphasizing the civilizational downward trend in violence. Recognition of these trends can in turn help determine further steps in mitigating levels of political violence.
Progressive cerebral deposition of amyloid beta occurs in Alzheimers disease and during the aging of certain mammals (human, monkey, dog, bear, cow, cat) but not others (rat, mouse). It is possibly ...due to different amino acid sequences at positions 5, 10 and 13. To address this issue, we performed series of 100 ns long trajectories (each trajectory was run twice with different initial velocity distribution) on amyloid beta (1-42) with the human and rat amino acid sequence in three different environments: water with only counter ions, water with NaCl at a concentration of 0.15 M as a model of intracellular Na(+) concentration at steady state, and water with NaCl at a concentration of 0.30 M as a model of intracellular Na(+) concentration under stimulated conditions. We analyzed secondary structure stability, internal hydrogen bonds, and residual fluctuation. It was observed that the change in ionic strength affects the stability of internal hydrogen bonds. Increasing the ionic strength increases atomic fluctuation in the hydrophobic core of the human amyloid, and decreases the atomic fluctuation in the case of rat amyloid. The secondary structure analyses show a stable α-helix part between residues 10 and 20. However, C-terminus of investigated amyloids is much more flexible showing no stable secondary structure elements. Increasing ionic strength of the solvent leads to decreasing stability of the secondary structural elements. The difference in conformational behavior of the three amino acids at position 5, 10 and 13 for human and rat amyloids significantly changes the conformational behavior of the whole peptide.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
This article is focused on the application of two types of docking software, AutoDock and DOCK. It is aimed at studying the interactions of a calcium-dependent bacterial lectin PA-IIL (from ...Pseudomonas aeruginosa) and its in silico mutants with saccharide ligands. The effect of different partial charges assigned to the calcium ions was tested and evaluated in terms of the best agreement with the crystal structure. The results of DOCK were further optimized by molecular dynamics and rescored using AMBER. For both software, the agreement of the docked structures and the provided binding energies were evaluated in terms of prediction accuracy. This was carried out by comparing the computed results to the crystal structures and experimentally determined binding energies, respectively. The performance of both docking software applied on a studied problem was evaluated as well. The molecular docking methods proved efficient in identifying the correct binding modes in terms of geometry and partially also in predicting the preference changes caused by mutation. Obtaining a reasonable in silico method for the prediction of lectin-saccharide interactions may be possible in the future.
The new version of the TRITON program provides user-friendly graphical tools for modeling protein mutants using the external program MODELLER and for docking ligands into the mutants using the ...external program AutoDock. TRITON can now be used to design ligand-binding proteins, to study protein–ligand binding mechanisms or simply to dock any ligand to a protein. Availability: Executable files of TRITON are available free of charge for academic users at http://ncbr.chemi.muni.cz/triton/ Contact: triton@chemi.muni.cz Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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