© 2015 The Author(s) Prediction of the bound configuration of small-molecule ligands that differ substantially from the cognate ligand of a protein co-crystal structure is much more challenging than re-docking the cognate ligand. Success rates for cross-do

Coral Reefs are among the most complex, biodiverse, and interconnected ecosystems on the planet. On a global scale, they are affected by increasing sea surface temperatures, alterations in seawater chemistry, changes in nutrient levels and overfishing. Many predict coral reefs will be the first ecosystemic victim of anthropogenic climate change. However, one of the most powerful ways of buffering a natural ecosystem, such as a coral reef, is to maximize resilience at the local level. The goal of this project is to improve understanding of the status of the reef in the Andaman Island Archipelago, India, and to communicate this understanding to managers to better protect them against global scale changes to come. This project will form a holistic picture of the reef by synthesizing existing data from research projects conducted in the region as well as from local agencies. In so doing, this project will create a semblance of long-term monitoring results adding to an understanding of how the reefs have been affected by different processes over the years. The results will identify the factors that are important for reef conservation at a scale relevant to local reef managers, and will communicate results to Forest Officials in a way that they find useful. This project will create a template that bridges the formidable gap between scientists and administrators by enabling effective communication between them.

Girls lag behind boys in education in India. They also appear to provide significant amount of childcare at home. In this paper I investigate if provision of childcare services by India’s largest child development program - Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) - helps to reduce gender education gap byreleasing girls from home responsibilities. There are several mechanisms by which the ICDS provides childcare directly and could reduce its cost. Using logit, covariate matching and conditional logit (villageand mother fixed-effects), I find that in rural India the girls 6-14 years, whose younger sibling below 5 years is receiving any of the ICDS services intensely, have 44% higher odds of schooling, than thosewhose sibling is either receiving no ICDS service or none intensely. The effect on boys 6-14 years is positive, but not robust. Further evidence suggests that younger age girls seem to be benefiting relativelymore, and the effect is driven mainly by positive health benefits of vaccinations of younger children, and perhaps of supplementary feeding. The bigger and more robust effect on girls seems to be consistent with evidence from time-use of children 6-14. In comparison to boys, relatively many more girls spendtime on childcare, especially those with very young siblings of ages 0-23 months, and significantly lesser number combine childcare and education.

Vital for human survival, peroxisomes are single membrane- bound organelles ubiquitously present in cells. Their role in cellular metabolism is required for certain metabolic pathways; consequently, in yeast, their biogenesis is inducible in the presence of specific nutrients. When they are no longer required by the cell, such as in starvation conditions, peroxisomes are delivered to the vacuole (equivalent to the mammalian lysosome) through a selective autophagic process known as pexophagy. Although the molecular mechanism of pexophagy has been studied in yeast, the signal transduction pathway that regulates pexophagy is poorly understood. Thus, in order to understand the signaling components involved in the pexophagy pathway, a genome-wide screen with all of the kinases and phosphatases in Saccharomyces cerevisiae was conducted with the viable deletion set of yeast mutants. The processing of thiolase-GFP, a peroxisomal matrix marker, was used to assay pexophagy. During this process, the vacuolar processing of thiolase-GFP occurs to yield stable GFP in the vacuole. Through careful analysis, a serine/ threonine mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase, standard name SLT2 and systematic name YHR030C, was discovered to be involved in peroxisome turnover in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. This observation has provided novel insights through which signal networking may be transduced to initiate pexophagy inside the cell

Mothers from poor families in India have a compelling need to work, but childcare for their young children is a constraint. This paper examines how far the public daycare helps in loosening this constraint. Todo this, I look at the effect on maternal labor force participation, of daycare implicit in the preschooling provided to young children, through India’s largest child development program - Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS). Besides preschooling, the ICDS program provides a whole package of other services, including supplementary feeding and immunization. Because of these services, I examine thevarious pathways through which the benefits on maternal employment can accrue: release of mother’s time from child supervision, improvement in health of young children and implicit income subsidy. For the analysis, I primarily use data from the recent demographic health survey data for 2005-6, which for the first time collected information on child level usage of ICDS services. Using probit, covariate matching and conditional logit (village-fixed effects), I find that the mother, whose child is receivinghighly correlated services of regular preschooling or daily supplementary feeding, is 12% more likely to work in rural India. This effect is being driven mainly by the rural Central, where such mothers are25% more likely to work. There is some evidence of positive effect in the rural South also. The investigation of mechanisms provides no support for those related to health benefits of daily supplementary feeding, or its implicit income subsidy. It seems that the effect is being driven mainly by daycare implicitin preschooling. There is also some evidence of health benefit mechanism through immunization received at the ICDS center. Further examination suggests lack of support for self-selection by motherinto daycare, because the children receiving regular feeding (highly correlated with daycare) are not anthropometrically better, and there is evidence of possible caste based discrimination against childrenfrom scheduled castes families in access to preschooling.

Numerous publicly available biomedical databases derive data by curating from literatures. However, using curated data in Machine Learning is challenging, because the exact mentions and locations in the text are lacking. This thesis describes a general approach to use curated data as training examples for information extraction. The idea is to formulate the problem as cost-sensitive learning from noisy labels, where the cost is estimated by a committee of classifiers that consider both curated data and the text