Dispositional coping, coping effectiveness, and cognitive social maturity among adolescent athletes.

It is accepted among scholars that coping changes as people mature during adolescence, but little is known about the relationship between maturity and coping. The purpose of this paper was to assess a model, which included dispositional coping, coping effectiveness, and cognitive social maturity. We predicted that cognitive social maturity would have a direct effect on coping effectiveness, and also an indirect impact via dispositional coping. Two hundred forty-five adolescent athletes completed measures of dispositional coping, coping effectiveness, and cognitive social maturity, which has three dimensions: conscientiousness, peer influence on behavior, and rule following. Using structural equation modeling, we found support for our model, suggesting that coping is related to cognitive social maturity. This information can be used to influence the content of coping interventions for adolescents of different maturational levels.

A structure-based strategy to identify new molecular scaffolds targeting the bacterial ribosomal A-site.

The need for novel antibiotics is widely recognized. A well validated target of antibiotics is the bacterial ribosome. Recent X-ray structures of the ribosome bound to antibiotics have shed new light on the binding sites of these antibiotics, providing fresh impetus for structure-based strategies aiming at identifying new ribosomal ligands. In that respect, the ribosomal decoding region of the aminoacyl-tRNA acceptor site (A-site) is of particular interest because oligonucleotide model systems of this site are available for crystallography, NMR and compound binding assays. This work presents how these different resources can be combined in a hierarchical screening strategy which has led to the identification of new A-site ligands. The approach exploits an X-ray structure of the A-site against which large and diverse libraries of compounds were computationally docked. The complementarity of the compounds to the A-site was assessed using a scoring function specifically calibrated for RNA targets. Starting from approximately 1 million compounds, the computational selection of candidate ligands allowed us to focus the experimental work on 129 compounds, 34 of which showed affinity for the A-site in a FRET-based binding assay. NMR experiments confirmed binding to the A-site for some compounds. For the most potent compound in the FRET assay, a tentative binding mode is suggested, which is compatible with the NMR data and the limited SAR in this series. Overall, the results validate the screening strategy.