Results and discussion   Cormorant Hb was crystallized using a slow nucleation process by adding glycerol to the precipitants along with low-salt buffer conditions. Crystals suitable for X-ray diffraction were obtained after 25 d and X-ray data were collected to 3.5 Å resolution. Solvent-content Gamma-Secretase Inhibitors analysis indicated that a half-molecule (α1β1 subunits) is present in the asymmetric unit with a solvent content of

42% and a Matthews coefficient (Matthews, 1968 ) of 2.13 Å3 Da−1. Attempts were made to solve the structure by the molecular-replacement method using Phaser (McCoy et al., 2007 ) as implemented in the CCP4 suite (Winn et al., 2011 ). The amino-acid sequence of both the α and β subunits of cormorant Hb is highly conserved

in both bar-headed and greylag goose Hbs. The coordinates of liganded and unliganded goose Hbs were used as initial search models for molecular replacement. Water molecules were removed from the models to avoid model bias and the best solution was obtained using the oxy form of greylag goose Hb (Liang et al., 2001 ). Refinement was carried out in REFMAC (Murshudov et al., 2011 ) as implemented in the CCP4 suite. A randomly selected 10% of the total reflections were excluded from refinement in order to use the cross-validation method (Brünger, 1992 ). Manual model building and structure validation were carried out in Coot (Emsley & Cowtan, 2004 ); although the overall resolution of the data set is 3.5 Å only one water molecule was picked up in the β haem site based on a simulated-annealing OMIT map. The final R work and R free were 0.18 and 0.26, respectively. Further analysis will be carried out to optimize the crystallization conditions to improve the diffraction quality and obtain higher resolution X-ray data in order to understand the molecular mechanism of cormorant Hb. Acknowledgments The authors

thank Dr M. D. Naresh and Dr S. M. Jaimohan of CSIR-CLRI, Chennai for their help during data collection. We thank Professor Dr D. Velmurugan, Head of the Center for Advanced Study in Crystallography and Biophysics, University of Madras, Chennai for allowing us to use the Dacomitinib laboratory facility.
The ancient Egyptians considered the heart as the central organ of the body, both physiologically and spiritually. The earliest hieroglyphic depiction of the heart was as an organ with eight vessels attached to it (Figure 1A). After the third Dynasty, the heart was modified to a simpler jar-shape (Figure 1B) 2 . Figure 1. Hieroglyphic depictions of the heart: (A) The early depiction of the heart with 8 vessels connected to it. (B) The simpler jar-shaped depiction of the heart used after the third Dynasty. The Smith papyrus (ca. 1600 BC) is the oldest known surgical treatise on trauma. It was named after Edwin Smith, the American Egyptologist who purchased the scroll in Luxor in 1862.