Early phase of slug's olfactory information processing occurs on an oscillatory network showing rhythmic activities. We found that the network consists of three different oscillator systems; tentacle, terminal mass and cell layer oscillators. The tentacle oscillators changed the oscillation amplitude during odor presentation. The nerve cutting experiment revealed that the neural activity in the tentacle ganglion modulates the coherency between the terminal and cell mass oscillators. Furthermore, it was revealed that the change of coherency between the cell mass and the terminal mass oscillators also modulates the spatio-temporal oscillatory behavior of cell layer oscillator network. It was shown that aversively learned odors applied to the inferior tentacle changed the spatio-temporal oscillatory behavior of cell layer oscillator network. Based on these facts, we speculated that learned odors changed the coherency between the cell mass and the terminal mass oscillators and induced changes in spatiotemporal oscillatory behavior of the cell mass oscillator network.

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Magnetic circular dichroisrn (MCD) has played an important role in elucidatiing the electronic structures of highly symrnetric rnolecules with degenerate ground and/or excited states, such as rnetalloporphyrins. For low symmetric molecules with nondegenerate states, such as chlorophylls and bacteriochlorophylls, MCD has been thought to be difficult to explore the information on their function and structure. In this article, recent application of MCD for these molecules is presented and the method is proven to provide useful inforrnation on their coordination state and aggregation structures.

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Predictions of protein tertiary structures are carried out by Monte Carlo simulations. Our approach consists of two aspects: the inclusion of accurate solvent effects and the development of powerful simulation algorithms that can avoid getting trapped in states of energy local minima. For the former, we discuss several models varying in nature from crude (distancedependent dielectric function) to rigorous (reference interaction site model). For the latter, we show the effectiveness of Monte Carlo simulated annealing and generalized-ensemble algorithms.

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Electrochemical response of some heme-prtteins was analyzed with poly (ethylene oxide) (PEO) as protein modifier and solvent. These PEO-modified protein hybrids show electron transfer reactions in PEO without a drop of water. Extremely high thermal stability on the redox reaction, such as at 130°C for 30min., was confirmed. This thermal stabilization was analyzed to be induced by the use of PEO as a solvent.

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