What is this disease related to abnormality in the oxygen-carrying protein haemoglobin that Chukwuedu Nwokolo is carrying out research on?
Sickle-cell disease
Title: Sortilin 1
Passage: Sortilin (SORT1) is a protein that in humans is encoded by the "SORT1" gene on chromosome 1.  This protein is a type I membrane glycoprotein in the vacuolar protein sorting 10 protein (Vps10p) family of sorting receptors.  While it is ubiquitously expressed in many tissues, sortilin is most abundant in the central nervous system.  At the cellular level, sortilin functions in protein transport between the Golgi apparatus, endosome, lysosome, and plasma membrane, leading to its involvement in multiple biological processes such as glucose and lipid metabolism as well as neural development and cell death.  Moreover, the function and role of sortilin is now emerging in several major human diseases such as atherosclerosis and coronary artery disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and cancer.  The "SORT1" gene also contains one of 27 loci associated with increased risk of coronary artery disease.
Title: Folding@home
Passage: Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project for disease research that simulates protein folding, computational drug design, and other types of molecular dynamics.  The project uses the idle processing resources of thousands of personal computers owned by volunteers who have installed the software on their systems.  Its main purpose is to determine the mechanisms of protein folding, which is the process by which proteins reach their final three-dimensional structure, and to examine the causes of protein misfolding.  This is of significant academic interest with major implications for medical research into Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, and many forms of cancer, among other diseases.  To a lesser extent, Folding@home also tries to predict a protein's final structure and determine how other molecules may interact with it, which has applications in drug design.  Folding@home is developed and operated by the Pande Laboratory at Stanford University, under the direction of Prof. Vijay Pande, and is shared by various scientific institutions and research laboratories across the world.
Title: NutritionDay
Passage: "nutritionDay worldwide" is a large scale, worldwide action project designed to reduce disease related malnutrition among hospitalised patients and nursing home residents.  The aim of this project is to increase awareness and knowledge regarding disease related malnutrition in hospitalised patients and the elderly.
Title: Erythrocruorin
Passage: Erythrocruorin is a large oxygen-carrying protein, which has a molecular mass greater than 3.5 million Daltons.  It is related to the similar chlorocruorin.  It is found in many annelids and arthropods (including some insects).
Title: Chukwuedu Nwokolo
Passage: Chukwuedu Nathaniel II Nwokolo (19 April 1921 – 18 May 2014) was an internationally distinguished tropical diseases, nutrition, human, medical, biological and life sciences expert; plus research scientist, scholar, pioneer medical doctor, author, humanitarian and acclaimed professor of medicine.  He was Nigerian, and is listed in the "Who's Who in Nigeria" series by Newswatch.  Nwokolo was outstandingly recognised worldwide for discovering and mapping out the area of paragonimiasis lung disease in Eastern Nigeria, with a study of the disease in Africa and clinical research for its control.  Nwokolo founded SICREP: Sickle Cell Research Programme to effectively fight the disease in Nigeria and globally.
Title: Southern tick-associated rash illness
Passage: Southern tick-associated rash illness (STARI) or Masters' disease is an emerging infectious disease related to Lyme disease that occurs in southeastern and south-central United States.  It is spread by tick bites, but the organism that causes the infection is unknown.
Title: HBB
Passage: Beta globin (also referred to as HBB, β-globin, haemoglobin beta, hemoglobin beta, or preferably haemoglobin subunit beta) is a globin protein, which along with alpha globin (HBA), makes up the most common form of haemoglobin in adult humans, the HbA.  It is 146 amino acids long and has a molecular weight of 15,867 Da.  Normal adult human HbA is a heterotetramer consisting of two alpha chains and two beta chains.
Title: PREDITOR
Passage: PREDITOR (PREDIction of TORsion angles) is a freely available web-server for the prediction of protein torsion angles from chemical shifts. For many years it has been known that protein chemical shifts are sensitive to protein secondary structure, which in turn, is sensitive to backbone torsion angles. torsion angles are internal coordinates that can be used to describe the conformation of a polypeptide chain.  They can also be used as constraints to help determine or refine protein structures via NMR spectroscopy.  In proteins there are four major torsion angles of interest: phi, psi, omega and chi-1.  Traditionally protein NMR spectroscopists have used vicinal J-coupling information and the Karplus relation to determine approximate backbone torsion angle constraints for phi and chi-1 angles.  However, several studies in the early 1990s pointed out the strong relationship between 1H and 13C chemical shifts and torsion angles, especially with backbone phi and psi angles.  Later a number of other papers pointed out additional chemical shift relationships with chi-1 and even omega angles.  PREDITOR was designed to exploit these experimental observations and to help NMR spectroscopists easily predict protein torsion angles from chemical shift assignments.  Specifically, PREDITOR accepts protein sequence and/or chemical shift data as input and generates torsion angle predictions for phi, psi, omega and chi-1 angles.  The algorithm that PREDITOR uses combines sequence alignment, chemical shift alignment and a number of related chemical shift analysis techniques to predict torsion angles. PREDITOR is unusually fast (<40 s per protein) and exhibits a very high level of accuracy.  In a series of tests 88% of PREDITOR’s phi/psi predictions were within 30 degrees of the correct values, 84% of chi-1 predictions (3-state predictions) were correct and 99.97% of PREDITOR’s predicted omega angles were correct.  PREDITOR also estimates the torsion angle errors so that its torsion angle constraints can be used with standard protein structure refinement software, such as CYANA, CNS, XPLOR and AMBER.  PREDITOR also supports automated protein chemical shift re-referencing and the prediction of proline cis/trans states.  PREDITOR is not the only torsion angle prediction software available.  Several other computer programs including TALOS, TALOS+ and DANGLE have also been developed to predict backbone torsion angles from protein chemical shifts.  These stand-alone programs exhibit similar prediction performance to PREDITOR but are substantially slower.
Title: Smouldering myeloma
Passage: Smouldering myeloma, also known as smoldering myeloma, smoldering multiple myeloma, indolent myeloma or asymptomatic myeloma, is a disease classified as intermediate in a spectrum of step-wise progressive diseases termed plasma cell dyscrasias.  In this spectrum of diseases, a clone of plasma cells secreting monoclonal paraprotein (also termed myeloma protein or M protein) causes the relatively benign disease of monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance.  This clone proliferates and may slowly evolve into more aggressive sub-clones that cause smouldering multiple myeloma.  Further and more rapid evolution causes the overtly malignant stage of multiple myeloma and can subsequently lead to the extremely malignant stage of secondary plasma cell leukemia.  Thus, some patients with smouldering myeloma progress to multiple myeloma and plasma cell leukemia.  Smouldering myeloma, however, is not a malignant disease.  It is characeterised as a pre-malignant disease that lacks symptoms but is associated with bone marrow biopsy showing the presence of an abnormal number of clonal myeloma cells, blood and/or urine containing a myeloma protein, and a significant risk of developing into a malignant disease.
Title: Sickle-cell disease
Passage: Sickle-cell disease (SCD) is a group of blood disorders typically inherited from a person's parents.  The most common type is known as sickle-cell anaemia (SCA).  It results in an abnormality in the oxygen-carrying protein haemoglobin (hemoglobin S) found in red blood cells.  This leads to a rigid, sickle-like shape under certain circumstances.  Problems in sickle cell disease typically begin around 5 to 6 months of age.  A number of health problems may develop, such as attacks of pain ("sickle-cell crisis"), anemia, swelling in the hands and feet, bacterial infections, and stroke.  Long term pain may develop as people get older.  The average life expectancy in the developed world is 40 to 60 years.
Chukwuedu Nwokolo Sickle-cell disease