Stretching of proteins in a uniform flow

Stretching of a protein by a fluid flow is compared to that in a force-clamp apparatus. The comparison is made within a simple topology-based dynamical model of a protein in which the effects of the flow are implemented using Langevin dynamics. We demonstrate that unfolding induced by a uniform flow shows a richer behavior than that in the force clamp. The dynamics of unfolding is found to depend strongly on the selection of the amino acid, usually one of the termini, which is anchored. These features offer potentially wider diagnostic tools to investigate structure of proteins compared to experiments based on the atomic force microscopy.Comment: J. Chem. Phys. (in press

A metapopulation model with Markovian landscape dynamics

We study a variant of Hanski's incidence function model that allows habitat patch characteristics to vary over time following a Markov process. The widely studied case where patches are classified as either suitable or unsuitable is included as a special case. For large metapopulations, we determine a recursion for the probability that a given habitat patch is occupied. This recursion enables us to clarify the role of landscape dynamics in the survival of a metapopulation. In particular, we show that landscape dynamics affects the persistence and equilibrium level of the metapopulation primarily through its effect on the distribution of a local population's life span.Comment: This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0

Low Temperature Susceptibility of the Noncentrosymmetric Superconductor CePt_3Si

We report ac susceptibility measurements of polycrystalline CePt_3Si down to 60 mK and in applied fields up to 9 T. In zero field, a full Meissner state emerges at temperatures T/Tc < 0.3, where Tc=0.65 K is the onset transition temperature. Though transport measurements show a relatively high upper critical field Bc2 ~ 4-5 T, the low temperature susceptibility, \chi', is quite fragile to applied field, with \chi' diminishing rapidly in fields of a few kG. Interestingly, the field dependence of \chi' is well described by the power law, 4\pi\chi'=(B/B_c)^{1/2}, where Bc is the field at which the onset of resistance is observed in transport measurements.Comment: 5 figure