Whitney Laning - Working for the Community and Being a Leader Essay

Whitney Laning - Working for the Community and Being a Leader - Essay Example The only way this can happen is if the community itself is full of trained volunteers ready and willing to move in and knowledgeable about basic field practices for rescue and triage. This is the concern of many fire chiefs throughout the country and one that was shared with community leader Whitney Laning more than a year ago. Unlike many, though, Laning took action, learning what kind of help firefighters needed to provide the community with greater safety and moving forward to organize this support. For the past year, Laning has worked tirelessly to bring together the Rowlett Citizen Corps Council (RCCC), a nonprofit group dedicated to finding funding for the CERT program and equipment, and the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) in the city. He was working to make the community a safer place for both citizens and emergency respondents, but his efforts were recently recognized in a big way. Laning was named one of the Five Outstanding Young Texans at a special black tie ceremony held in the state capital. According to him, the primary program is the CERT program. This organization functions during normal emergency situations by providing canteen services to the firefighters – giving them cool drinks, food to help them keep up their strength and a cool place to rest when fighting a long-term fire. However, those trained in the CERT program are also able to jump in and lend a hand when required at times when emergency personnel are overwhelmed. Fire Chief Larry Wright states, If we had a large scale disaster like a tornado come through here, it could be 24-72 hours before we received any kind of state of federal assistance. That’s where these citizens will be able to make a real difference. Laning’s leadership in these programs has been instrumental in obtaining the multiple awards and recognitions each program has received to date, according to Greg and Lisa Peoples, the Junior Chamber of Commerce members who nominated Laning for the award.   According to a written statement by them, Whitney is the co-author of the bylaws, shaped the mission statement, teaches the CERT courses and serves as a spokesperson, fundraiser and grant writer for CERT.

Computational Biology The Serine Protease Active Site Essay - 1

Computational Biology The Serine Protease Active Site - Essay Example Chymotrypsin belongs to the trypsin family of serine proteases and is usually secreted in inactive form (zymogen) in the small intestine. The structure of chymotrypsin was elucidated via the X-ray crystallography.Below is the structure of chymotrypsinogen (see Error: Reference source not found) The active site is the catalytic unit of an enzyme. The determination of the three-dimensional structure of chymotrypsin by X-ray crystallography was the basis of greater insight into the mechanism of action of serine proteases. The Swiss-PDB Viewer software available at http://spdbv.vital-it.ch/disclaim.html was used to manipulate the coordinates of chymotrypsin and subtilisin serine proteases retrieved from the protein data bank (PDB available at www.rcsb.org). The catalytic site of most srine peptidaeses including chymotrypsin is composed of a catalytic traid of serine, histidine and aspartic acid residues. The ezyme the experimnt dealt with are are serine proteases and they have been known to exhibit similar spatial arrangements. However, the residues of the enzymes may adopt different order in the amino acid sequence. Catalytic triad is composed of Ser195 on one side and Asp102 and His57 on the other side inside the active site cleft. An extensive hydrogen bonding network exists in the triad for instance NÃŽ ´1-H of His57 and OÃŽ ´1 of Asp102 and also between OH of Ser195 and the NÃŽ µ2-H of His57. However in the event that His57 is protonated the latter bond is lost (Hedstrom, 2002). Figure 8: The positions of the backbone nitrogens are shown; the residues are Ser195 and Gly193 and the distances from these nitrogens to the peptide carbonyl oxygen. This brings the two residues closer for interactions to occur The catalytic triad in subtilisin contains residues 32, 64 and 221; the oxyanion hole comprises the side chain of Asn155 and the backbone NH of Ser 221; the mouth of the specificity