This monograph is the first easy-to-read-and-understand book on prion proteins' molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and on prions' molecular modelling (MM) constructions. It enables researchers to see what is crucial to the conformational change from normal cellular prion protein (PrP C ) to diseased infectious prions (PrP Sc ), using MD and MM techniques. As we all know, prion diseases, caused by the body's own proteins, are invariably fatal and highly infectious neurodegenerative diseases effecting humans and almost all animals for a major public health concern. Prion contains no nucleic acids and it is a misshapen or conformation-changed protein that acts like an infectious agent; thus prion diseases are called protein structural conformational diseases.

PrP C is predominant in -helices but PrP Sc are rich in -sheets in the form as amyloid fibrils; so very amenable to be studied by MD techniques. Through MD, studies on the proteinstructures and the structural conversion are very important for revealing secrets of prion diseases and for structure-based drug design or discovery. Rabbits, dogs, horses and buffaloes are reported to be the few low susceptibility species to prion diseases; this book's MD studies on these species are clearly helpful to understand the mechanism underlying the resistance to prion diseases. PrP(1-120) usually has no clear molecular structures; this book also studies this unstructured region through MD and especially MM techniques from the global optimization point of view.

This book is ideal for practitioners in computing of biophysics, biochemistry, biomedicine, bioinformatics, cheminformatics, materials science and engineering, applied mathematics and theoretical physics, information technology, operations research, biostatistics, etc. As an accessible introduction to these fields, this book is also ideal as a teaching material for students.

Systemically studies the structures of prion proteins, especially the PrP models of resistant species to prion diseases (dog, rabbit, horse and buffalo) Introduces local and global search computational optimization into the studies of prion protein structures and neurodegenerative amyloid fibrils Unites and analyzes structures of prion proteins standing on the point of view and systemically carries out the molecular dynamics simulations of the prion protein structures

Autorentext

Dr Jiapu Zhang received bachelor degree in 1993, first master degree in research in 1996, both from Qufu Normal University, P.R. China; second master degree in research in 2000 from National University of Singapore, Republic of Singapore; a PhD degree in 2005 from Federation University, Australia; and then a formal postdoctoral fellowship training from CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation), Australia. Dr Zhang also received honors in Australia and worldwide for his prion research. In 2011, the report of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Technology Review on his prion results caused worldwide impacts so that several organizations (e.g., the Physics Society of Iran) published his prion results in seven languages. NHMRC (National Health and Medical Research Council) of Australia has assigned him review tasks on prion projects. CSIRO once conferred him an award (together with Drs. Varghese JN and Epa VC) for rabbit prion protein research. He has been a reviewer for many top academic journals (e.g., Nature). All these made Dr. Zhang feel honored for his prion research.

Inhalt

Basic Knowledge.- The Homology Structure and Dynamics.- The NMR Structure and Dynamics of the Wild-type and Mutants.- **** Compared with the NMR Structure and Dynamics of Humans and Mice.- Compared with the NMR Structure and Dynamics of Dogs and Horses.- Compared with a Homology Structure and Dynamics of Buffaloes.- Compared with NMR Structure and Dynamics of Elks.- Compared with the X-ray Structure and Dynamics of Rabbits.- Surface Electrostatic Charge Distributions .- The Hydrophobic Region PrP(109136) .- The Hybrid Method of Steepest Descent - Conjugate Gradient with Simulated Annealing.- Hybrid Method of Discrete Gradient with Simulated Annealing or Genetic Algorithm.- A Novel Canonical Dual Global Optimization Computational Approach.- The Hybrid Method of Evolutionary Computations with Simulated Annealing.- Simulated Annealing Refined Replica Exchange Global Search Algorithm.- LBFGS Quasi-Newtonian Methods for MM Prion AGAAAAGA Amyloid Fibrils.- Particle Swarm Global Optimization Search Algorithm.- A Summary of the Research Works on AGAAAAGA.