Background: Since the publication of the first draft of the human genome in 2000, bioinformatic data have been accumulating at an overwhelming pace. Currently, more than 3 million sequences and 35 thousand structures of proteins and nucleic acids are available in public databases. Finding correlations in and between these data to answer critical research questions is extremely challenging. This problem needs to be approached from several directions: information science to organize and search the data; information visualization to assist in recognizing correlations; mathematics to formulate statistical inferences; and biology to analyze chemical and physical properties in terms of sequence and structure changes.

Two photorefractive polymer composites are presented that exhibit the fastest response times reported to date by an order of magnitude (τg≈5 ms at 1 W/cm2), while maintaining large gain coefficients (Γ≈230 and 130 cm−1). These materials show promise for video-rate optical processing applications. The factors limiting the photorefractive speed in these materials are investigated.

Multiple Alignment is a new interface for performing and analyzing multiple protein structure alignments. It enables viewing levels of sequence and structure similarity on the aligned structures and performing a variety of evolutionary and bioinformatic tasks, including the construction of structure-based phylogenetic trees and minimal basis sets of structures that best represent the topology of the phylogenetic tree. It is implemented as a plugin for VMD (Visual Molecular Dynamics), which is distributed by the NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics at the University of Illinois.

No abstract

The photorefractive properties of polymer composites based on poly(N-vinylcarbazole), doped with the sensitizer C 60 , the plasticizer butyl benzyl phthalate, and two series of chromophores are presented. The influence of the structure and the oxidation potential of the chromophore on the photorefractive properties is discussed. These materials show promise for video-rate optical processing applications, since they exhibit fast response times (beamcoupling growth times, τ g , as small as 60 ms at 50 V/µm applied field and 200 mW/cm 2 intensity and τ g as small as 5 ms at 100 V/µm and 1 W/cm 2 ).