Overcoming bottlenecks in the membrane protein structural biology pipeline

Membrane proteins account for a third of the eukaryotic proteome, but are greatly under-represented in the Protein Data Bank. Unfortunately, recent technological advances in X-ray crystallography and EM cannot account for the poor solubility and stability of membrane protein samples. A limitation of conventional detergent-based methods is that detergent molecules destabilize membrane proteins, leading to their aggregation. The use of orthologues, mutants and fusion tags has helped improve protein stability, but at the expense of not working with the sequence of interest. Novel detergents such as glucose neopentyl glycol (GNG), maltose neopentyl glycol (MNG) and calixarene-based detergents can improve protein stability without compromising their solubilizing properties. Styrene maleic acid lipid particles (SMALPs) focus on retaining the native lipid bilayer of a membrane protein during purification and biophysical analysis. Overcoming bottlenecks in the membrane protein structural biology pipeline, primarily by maintaining protein stability, will facilitate the elucidation of many more membrane protein structures in the near future.

The 6P's of sales resource management

This paper will explore a data-driven approach called Sales Resource Management (SRM) that can provide real insight into sales management. The DSMT (Diagnosis, Strategy, Metrics and Tools) framework can be used to solve field sales management challenges. This paper focus on the 6P's strategy of SRM and illustrates how to use them to solve the CAPS (Concentration, Attrition, Performance and Spend) challenges. © 2010 IEEE.

Sales resource management training:a guide to developing effective salespeople

This paper adopts a sales resource management (SRM) framework to provide guidance on how to develop effective salespeople via sales training. SRM can be used to identify the individual training needs based on the individual-based modelling data. The individual-based modelling data can also be used to evaluate the outcome of sales training. This paper also gives some suggestions on the forms of sales training which are most likely to develop effective salespeople. © 2010 IEEE.

Shape from photographs:a multi-view stereo pipeline

Acquiring 3D shape from images is a classic problem in Computer Vision occupying researchers for at least 20 years. Only recently however have these ideas matured enough to provide highly accurate results. We present a complete algorithm to reconstruct 3D objects from images using the stereo correspondence cue. The technique can be described as a pipeline of four basic building blocks: camera calibration, image segmentation, photo-consistency estimation from images, and surface extraction from photo-consistency. In this Chapter we will put more emphasis on the latter two: namely how to extract geometric information from a set of photographs without explicit camera visibility, and how to combine different geometry estimates in an optimal way. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.