Research in the pharmaceutical industry today is in many respects quite different from what it used to be only fifteen years ago. There have been dramatic changes in approaches for identifying new chemical entities with a desired biological activity. While chemical modification of existing leads was the most important approach in the 1970s and 1980s, high-throughput screening and structure-based design are now major players among a multitude of methods used in drug discov- ery. Quite often, companies favor one of these relatively new approaches over the other, e.g., screening over rational...

Carbonic anhydrase (CA) is a seemingly ubiquitous enzyme of profound physiological importance, which plays essential roles in respiration, acid-base homeostasis, bone resorption, calcification, photosynthesis, several biosynthetic pathways and a variety of processes involving ion, gas and fluid transfer. This enzyme, which is present in at least three gene families (a,, ?), has found favour as a model for the study of evolution of gene families and for site-directed mutagenesis in structure/function relationships, for protein folding and for transgenic and gene target studies. Since the early...

LIST OF PARTICIPANTS 11 THERMOPHILIC HYDROLYTIC ENZYMES (PROTEINASES, AMYLASES) 17 Thermal Stability of Homologous Neutral Metalloendopeptidases in Thermo- philic and Mesophilic Bacteria: Structural Considerations M. K. PANGBURN, P. L. LEVY, K. A. WALSH and H. NEURATH 19 The Structure and Stability of Thermolysin L. H. WEAVER, W. R. KESTER, K. F. TEN EYCK and B. W. MATTHEWS 31 Studies of the Inhibition of Thermolysin J. FEDER, N. AUFDERHEIDE and B. S. WILDI 41 Effect of EDTA on the Conformational Stability of Thermolysin A. FONTANA, E. BOCCU and F. M. VERONESE 55 Role of a Sulfhydryl Group in...

The idea to write this volume arose in May, 1979 on the "Annual Seminar on Sta- tistical Physics" in Lahnwitz near Gustrow, a nice resort place of the Padagogische Hochschule Liselotte Herrmann Gustrow, where most of the authors were present. The participants of this seminar agreed in the general opinion that the transport properties of charged particle systems starting from ionized gases and ending with liquid metals should be interpreted in a unique way. The basic method of such a uni- fied theory which is still in "status nascendi" nowadays, should be the statistical physics of systems...

Recent publications on the fate of our limited earth have stirred up vivid worldwide discussions, during which it became clear that our knowledge of the complex ecosystem is far from sufficient today. All planning and predictive models are only as good as the input data they are based on. Improved research methods and new ideas and impulses are therefore urgently needed, both to stimulate the specialized scientists and to supply the concerned citizen with the updated background information necessary to make responsible decisions. Generally, most of the serious publications in the field of...

In the autumn of 1971 F. Hoffmann-La Roche & Co. Ltd in Basel celebrated their 75th anniversary. The company was one of the first in the chemical industry to concentrate from the beginning on pharmaceuticals. Step by step new activi- ties were taken up, but all within the frontiers of biology. During the 75 years of Roche the research division has become by far the largest department in the company, with basic research assuming an increasingly important part in it. For this reason Roche cannot but feel a share of res pons i- bility towards the many problems raised by biomedical progress....