Philips

About: Philips is a company organization based out in Vantaa, Finland. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Signal & Layer (electronics). The organization has 68260 authors who have published 99663 publications receiving 1882329 citations. The organization is also known as: Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. & Royal Philips Electronics.

Inhibition of furin-mediated cleavage activation of HIV-1 glycoprotein gp160.

Abstract: The envelope glycoprotein of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) initiates infection by mediating fusion of the viral envelope with the cell membrane. Fusion activity requires proteolytic cleavage of the gp160 protein into gp120 and gp41 at a site containing several arginine and lysine residues. Activation at basic cleavage sites is observed with many membrane proteins of cellular and viral origin. We have recently found that the enzyme activating the haemagglutinin of fowl plague virus (FPV), an avian influenza virus, is furin. Furin, a subtilisin-like eukaryotic endoprotease, has a substrate specificity for the consensus amino-acid sequence Arg-X-Lys/Arg-Arg at the cleavage site. We show here that the glycoprotein of HIV-1, which has the same protease recognition motif as the FPV haemagglutinin, is also activated by furin.

Monte Carlo study of the isotropic and nematic phases of infinitely thin hard platelets

Abstract: We present the results of a detailed Monte Carlo study of the phase diagram of infinitely thin hard platelets. A weak first order isotropicnematic transition is observed. The equation of state in the isotropic regime is compared with several current theories, none of which is found to be fully satisfactory. The density dependence of the nematic order parameter is found to be compatible with a ‘critical’ exponent β=0·25. A study of the fluctuations of the order parameter in the isotropic phase casts doubt on the applicability of the Landau-de Gennes expression for the free energy. We observe that the relation between the nematic order parameters and is compatible with the predictions of mean-field theory. Practical aspects of the computation are discussed. A novel method to compute the pressure in a constant-volume Monte Carlo run is presented.