We purified and characterized a new fungal catalase. The specific activity of the preparation obtained is 1500 UI/mg of protein. We found a molecular weight of 215,000 and a pI of 5.5 for this enzyme.
Accumulating evidence suggests that certain features of hepatitis C virus (HCV), especially its high genetic variability, might be responsible for the low efficiency of anti-HCV treatment. Here, we present a bioinformatic analysis of HCV-1a populations isolated from 23 children with chronic hepatitis C (CHC) subjected to interferon–ribavirin therapy. The structures of the viral quasispecies were established based on a 132-amino-acid sequence derived from E1/E2 protein, including hypervariable region 1 (HVR1). Two types of HCV populations were identified. The first type, found in non-responders, contained a small number of closely related variants. The second type, characteristic for sustained responders, was composed of a large number of distantly associated equal-rank variants. Comparison of 445 HVR1 sequences showed that a significant number of variants present in non-responding patients are closely related, suggesting that certain, still unidentified properties of the pathogen may be key factors determining the result of CHC treatment.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00705-010-0789-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
One of the most important aspect of molecular and computational biology is the reconstruction of evolutionary relationships. The area is well explored after decades of intensive research. Despite this fact there remains a need for good and efficient algorithms that are capable of reconstructing the evolutionary relationship in reasonable time.Since the problem is computationally intractable, exact algorithms are used only for small groups of species. In the Maximum Parsimony approach the time of computation grows so fast when number of sequences increases, that in practice it is possible to find the optimal solution for instances containing about 20 sequences only.It is this reason that in practical applications, heuristic methods are used. In this paper, parallel adaptive memory programming algorithms based on Maximum Parsimony and some known neighborhood search methods for phylogenetic tree construction are proposed, and the results of computational experiments are presented. The proposed algorithms achieve a superlinear speedup and find solutions of good quality.
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