116,720 research outputs found
Eigenvector Centrality Distribution for Characterization of Protein Allosteric Pathways
Determining the principal energy pathways for allosteric communication in
biomolecules, that occur as a result of thermal motion, remains challenging due
to the intrinsic complexity of the systems involved. Graph theory provides an
approach for making sense of such complexity, where allosteric proteins can be
represented as networks of amino acids. In this work, we establish the
eigenvector centrality metric in terms of the mutual information, as a mean of
elucidating the allosteric mechanism that regulates the enzymatic activity of
proteins. Moreover, we propose a strategy to characterize the range of the
physical interactions that underlie the allosteric process. In particular, the
well known enzyme, imidazol glycerol phosphate synthase (IGPS), is utilized to
test the proposed methodology. The eigenvector centrality measurement
successfully describes the allosteric pathways of IGPS, and allows to pinpoint
key amino acids in terms of their relevance in the momentum transfer process.
The resulting insight can be utilized for refining the control of IGPS
activity, widening the scope for its engineering. Furthermore, we propose a new
centrality metric quantifying the relevance of the surroundings of each
residue. In addition, the proposed technique is validated against experimental
solution NMR measurements yielding fully consistent results. Overall, the
methodologies proposed in the present work constitute a powerful and cost
effective strategy to gain insight on the allosteric mechanism of proteins
Distributed Control of Microscopic Robots in Biomedical Applications
Current developments in molecular electronics, motors and chemical sensors
could enable constructing large numbers of devices able to sense, compute and
act in micron-scale environments. Such microscopic machines, of sizes
comparable to bacteria, could simultaneously monitor entire populations of
cells individually in vivo. This paper reviews plausible capabilities for
microscopic robots and the physical constraints due to operation in fluids at
low Reynolds number, diffusion-limited sensing and thermal noise from Brownian
motion. Simple distributed controls are then presented in the context of
prototypical biomedical tasks, which require control decisions on millisecond
time scales. The resulting behaviors illustrate trade-offs among speed,
accuracy and resource use. A specific example is monitoring for patterns of
chemicals in a flowing fluid released at chemically distinctive sites.
Information collected from a large number of such devices allows estimating
properties of cell-sized chemical sources in a macroscopic volume. The
microscopic devices moving with the fluid flow in small blood vessels can
detect chemicals released by tissues in response to localized injury or
infection. We find the devices can readily discriminate a single cell-sized
chemical source from the background chemical concentration, providing
high-resolution sensing in both time and space. By contrast, such a source
would be difficult to distinguish from background when diluted throughout the
blood volume as obtained with a blood sample
A Novel A Priori Simulation Algorithm for Absorbing Receivers in Diffusion-Based Molecular Communication Systems
A novel a priori Monte Carlo (APMC) algorithm is proposed to accurately
simulate the molecules absorbed at spherical receiver(s) with low computational
complexity in diffusion-based molecular communication (MC) systems. It is
demonstrated that the APMC algorithm achieves high simulation efficiency since
by using this algorithm, the fraction of molecules absorbed for a relatively
large time step length precisely matches the analytical result. Therefore, the
APMC algorithm overcomes the shortcoming of the existing refined Monte Carlo
(RMC) algorithm which enables accurate simulation for a relatively small time
step length only. Moreover, for the RMC algorithm, an expression is proposed to
quickly predict the simulation accuracy as a function of the time step length
and system parameters, which facilitates the choice of simulation time step for
a given system. Furthermore, a rejection threshold is proposed for both the RMC
and APMC algorithms to significantly save computational complexity while
causing an extremely small loss in accuracy.Comment: 11 pages, 14 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on
NanoBioscience. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1803.0463
Field-induced charge transport at the surface of pentacene single crystals: a method to study charge dynamics of 2D electron systems in organic crystals
A method has been developed to inject mobile charges at the surface of
organic molecular crystals, and the DC transport of field-induced holes has
been measured at the surface of pentacene single crystals. To minimize damage
to the soft and fragile surface, the crystals are attached to a pre-fabricated
substrate which incorporates a gate dielectric (SiO_2) and four probe pads. The
surface mobility of the pentacene crystals ranges from 0.1 to 0.5 cm^2/Vs and
is nearly temperature-independent above ~150 K, while it becomes thermally
activated at lower temperatures when the induced charges become localized.
Ruling out the influence of electric contacts and crystal grain boundaries, the
results contribute to the microscopic understanding of trapping and detrapping
mechanisms in organic molecular crystals.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures. Submitted to J. Appl. Phy
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