removing characters from a string?

[jesse at multimediacollective.com]

say I had a string. 


this_string = "jesse at multimediacollective.com"

"""and I wanted to get rid of the @, how would I do that? This 
process has to be efficent for removing large quantities of special 
characters, such as <,>,#,%,* etc, from the same string.  

Any advice would be very helpful.  Thanks in advance, Jesse.