Paul Fletcher - US grants

This award will support a research collaboration between Professor Fletcher of East Carolina University and Professor Lourival D. Possani of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City. The investigators intend to specifically identify the receptor proteins in mammalian pancreas that are targeted by scorpion venom toxic proteins to activate exocrine secretory discharge. Identification will measure venom protein binding and localize the receptors at the cellular level. The work is expected to lead to the isolation and characterization of these receptors. The U.S. laboratory will supply the Mexican laboratory with biotinylated and radiolabled scorpion venom proteins while the Mexican laboratory will provide synthetic peptide analogs of the venom proteins. Both laboratories will use scorpion venom supplied by the Buntanton Institute in Brazil. Interest in exploring these venoms and their effect on the pancreas is high because they share no features in common with proteins and peptides previously described that are also known to act on the exocrine pancreas. These studies seem to include that certain excitatory behavior, usually associated with nerve and muscle cells, may also occur in epithelial tissue and thus may increase our understanding of receptor-mediated secretory activity of these tissues.

This award is made under the high performance connections portion of ANIR's "Connections to the Internet" announcement, NSF 98-102. It provides partial support for two years for an OC-3 connection to the vBNS. Applications involve telemedicine, scorpion venom protein research, visualization-aided reverse engineering on violins and multivariate strategies development in chemistry. Collaborating institutions include: Syracuse University, Ohio State University, Ohio Supercomputing Center, North Carolina Supercomputing Center, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, University of Wisconsin, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Virginia Polytechnic University and the Measurement and Control Engineering Center at the University of Tennessee.

This project, acquiring a high-performance distributed-memory cluster, will enable computationally aggressive techniques to be applied in a variety of disciplines. This cluster is designed to support the following projects:

-Investigating the role of solvent in catalytic organometallic transformations,
-Study of arthropod evolutionary diversification,
-Computational fluid dynamics development of advanced engines,
-Molecular dynamics simulations of the voltage-gated potassium channel, Kv1.3,
-Study of p53-binding S100 proteins,
-All-electron studies on the explosive nature of organic molecular crystals, and
-Strategies to reduce the risk associated with the atmospheric emission of Hg compounds.

Each of these applications is discussed and computational methods to be employed and their hardware and software requirements are presented. A system including fast interconnect and up to 256 processors with 2 GBytes of local memory, accompanied by several TBytes of online storage, is proposed.