Wassim Sidani

The comment on this picture is hilarious.

cheetah and its cub

A student of mine asked me about the usefulness of C-peptide in proinsulin, after some googling, I landed on this piece of information which seems to answer this question.
The answer is in the last line.

Proinsulin is synthesized as a single chain, 110 amino acid (aa) preproprecursor that contains a 24 aa signal sequence and an 86 aa proinsulin. Following removal of the signal peptide, the proinsulin peptide undergoes further proteolysis to generate mature insulin, a 51 aa disulfide-linked dimer that consists of a 30 aa B chain (aa 25 – 54) bound to a 21 aa A chain (aa 90 – 110). The 34 aa intervening peptide (aa 55 – 89) that connects the B and A chains is termed the C-peptide. Human proinsulin shares 84% and 80% aa sequence identity with rat and bovine proinsulin, respectively. Most of the sequence variation between species occurs in the region of the C-peptide. This peptide generates a structural conformation that allows for the correct formation of the intrachain disulfide bonds.

A common mistake regarding RU 486 is saying that it decreases the secretion of progesterone.
RU 486 does not interfere with the secretion of progesterone.
It is an antagonist of progesterone, which means that it simply blocks progesterone receptors and prevents progesterone from acting on its target cells without actually lowering its concentration in the blood.

Dear LS students,
Here’s a link you don’t want to miss: http://www.sidani.info/ls2010/
Regards.

I had some free time to experiment and decided to port an application I wrote earlier to AS3. The scrollPane component is at the heart of this application and much to my surprise, the AS3 version has almost the same erratic behavior as the AS2 version when it comes to the scrollbars appearing when needed. It seems that we also need to find workarounds for the \”much faster, much cleaner version\” of actionscript i.e. AS3.\r\n

More About this in the coming days.\r\n