Larry P. Taylor-Home

MHRI (in the Amino Acid Font)

The University Of Michigan

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for

Larry P. Taylor, Ph. D. (retired)

aka "Harris"

Email:

U of Michigan: lpt

Diving: divegeek

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Michigan (in the Amino Acid Font)

My background is primarily in organic chemistry. After obtaining my PH.D. in biochemistry while working full-time running a peptide synthesis laboratory, I came to the University of Michigan in 1986 for post-doctoral study in the laboratory of Huda Akil and Stan Watson. I have been with them at MHRI (now the Molecular & Behavioral Neuroscience Institute; MBNI) ever since. Their laboratory is involved in the anatomical and biochemical mapping of the brain circuitry involved in emotional responses, especially stress-related matters. My primary role is to examine molecules involved in these processes. I call it "molecular psychology" (If you were a ligand, where would you be most comfortable?). Since the labs of Huda Akil and Stan Watson are intimately related, those working in their lab have adapted a common name; we refer to the lab as the WAKIL group.

The Peptide Images On this Page are chemically correct representations of the amino acid sequences listed in the image (using the standard single letter amino acid code). The peptides were generated with SYBYL molecular modeling software and energy minimized using the Kollman All-Atom Force Field (with consideration of Kollman charges). The coloring scheme (except for school colors used in the MICHIGAN peptide) are based on physical properties of the individual amino acids. I have left the MHRI peptide here since there can be no named peptide for MBNI as there is no "B" in the amino acid code.

Divegeek (Diving Myths & Realities)

has been on-line since July, 2001.

It has had more than 655,000 visitors.

Harris Links is my entire collection of bookmarks (Validated monthly; Last Validation: 8/ 31/ 08)

This compilation is typically downloaded more than 1000 times / month (maximum monthly download: 9,882)

Classic SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) @ home was a global collection of people and institutions who donated time on their computers to assist in analyzing radio astronomy data with the hopes that embedded in stellar radio frequency radiation are signals that originate from sentient beings. This involves mathematical signal analysis of enormous proportions. SETI at Home pioneered the process (Distributed Computing) of splitting large computational workloads into small chunks for processing by home computers; managing downloads of data and uploads of finished computations, and finally reassembling and validating results from millions of individual computers to yield a finished determination. This made the SETI at Home project the equivalent of a massive (more than 5.4 million contributors) parallel processing super computer. It is perhaps the best-ever example of true global cooperation. The project terminated in December of 2005. At its termination, my contribution (from May, 1999 to December, 2005) was 17,171 work units (The equivalent of 14.13 years of cpu time). This was more than 99.72 % of all participants.

Classic SETI at home has evolved into BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) that uses a common client to manage multiple distributed computing projects. So, users can contribute computer processing time to a variety of projects including molecular protein folding, climate analysis, stellar gravitation and several projects directly related to medical research. Researchers can now consider computationally intense problems far beyond the cost and computing power of any single laboratory. Although SETI@Home is my primary project (85% of my donated computer time), I also contribute small amounts of computer time to Einstein@Home (Gravitational wave detection ... 10 %) and the older version of Predictor@Home (Predicting protein 3D structure from an amino acid sequence ... 5 %). Now, I am only contributing to SETI and Einstein.