2,063 research outputs found
The dark side of centromeres: types, causes and consequences of structural abnormalities implicating centromeric DNA
Centromeres are the chromosomal domains required to ensure faithful transmission of the genome during cell division. They have a central role in preventing aneuploidy, by orchestrating the assembly of several components required for chromosome separation. However, centromeres also adopt a complex structure that makes them susceptible to being sites of chromosome rearrangements. Therefore, preservation of centromere integrity is a difficult, but important task for the cell. In this review, we discuss how centromeres could potentially be a source of genome instability and how centromere aberrations and rearrangements are linked with human diseases such as cancer
A Hebbian approach to complex network generation
Through a redefinition of patterns in an Hopfield-like model, we introduce
and develop an approach to model discrete systems made up of many, interacting
components with inner degrees of freedom. Our approach clarifies the intrinsic
connection between the kind of interactions among components and the emergent
topology describing the system itself; also, it allows to effectively address
the statistical mechanics on the resulting networks. Indeed, a wide class of
analytically treatable, weighted random graphs with a tunable level of
correlation can be recovered and controlled. We especially focus on the case of
imitative couplings among components endowed with similar patterns (i.e.
attributes), which, as we show, naturally and without any a-priori assumption,
gives rise to small-world effects. We also solve the thermodynamics (at a
replica symmetric level) by extending the double stochastic stability
technique: free energy, self consistency relations and fluctuation analysis for
a picture of criticality are obtained
Irreducible free energy expansion and overlaps locking in mean field spin glasses
We introduce a diagrammatic formulation for a cavity field expansion around
the critical temperature. This approach allows us to obtain a theory for the
overlap's fluctuations and, in particular, the linear part of the
Ghirlanda-Guerra relationships (GG) (often called Aizenman-Contucci polynomials
(AC)) in a very simple way. We show moreover how these constraints are
"superimposed" by the symmetry of the model with respect to the restriction
required by thermodynamic stability. Within this framework it is possible to
expand the free energy in terms of these irreducible overlaps fluctuations and
in a form that simply put in evidence how the complexity of the solution is
related to the complexity of the entropy.Comment: 19 page
Non-equilibrium Lorentz gas on a curved space
The periodic Lorentz gas with external field and iso-kinetic thermostat is
equivalent, by conformal transformation, to a billiard with expanding
phase-space and slightly distorted scatterers, for which the trajectories are
straight lines. A further time rescaling allows to keep the speed constant in
that new geometry. In the hyperbolic regime, the stationary state of this
billiard is characterized by a phase-space contraction rate, equal to that of
the iso-kinetic Lorentz gas. In contrast to the iso-kinetic Lorentz gas where
phase-space contraction occurs in the bulk, the phase-space contraction rate
here takes place at the periodic boundaries
Log-periodic drift oscillations in self-similar billiards
We study a particle moving at unit speed in a self-similar Lorentz billiard
channel; the latter consists of an infinite sequence of cells which are
identical in shape but growing exponentially in size, from left to right. We
present numerical computation of the drift term in this system and establish
the logarithmic periodicity of the corrections to the average drift
Analogue neural networks on correlated random graphs
We consider a generalization of the Hopfield model, where the entries of
patterns are Gaussian and diluted. We focus on the high-storage regime and we
investigate analytically the topological properties of the emergent network, as
well as the thermodynamic properties of the model. We find that, by properly
tuning the dilution in the pattern entries, the network can recover different
topological regimes characterized by peculiar scalings of the average
coordination number with respect to the system size. The structure is also
shown to exhibit a large degree of cliquishness, even when very sparse.
Moreover, we obtain explicitly the replica symmetric free energy and the
self-consistency equations for the overlaps (order parameters of the theory),
which turn out to be classical weighted sums of 'sub-overlaps' defined on all
possible sub-graphs. Finally, a study of criticality is performed through a
small-overlap expansion of the self-consistencies and through a whole
fluctuation theory developed for their rescaled correlations: Both approaches
show that the net effect of dilution in pattern entries is to rescale the
critical noise level at which ergodicity breaks down.Comment: 34 pages, 3 figure
How glassy are neural networks?
In this paper we continue our investigation on the high storage regime of a
neural network with Gaussian patterns. Through an exact mapping between its
partition function and one of a bipartite spin glass (whose parties consist of
Ising and Gaussian spins respectively), we give a complete control of the whole
annealed region. The strategy explored is based on an interpolation between the
bipartite system and two independent spin glasses built respectively by
dichotomic and Gaussian spins: Critical line, behavior of the principal
thermodynamic observables and their fluctuations as well as overlap
fluctuations are obtained and discussed. Then, we move further, extending such
an equivalence beyond the critical line, to explore the broken ergodicity phase
under the assumption of replica symmetry and we show that the quenched free
energy of this (analogical) Hopfield model can be described as a linear
combination of the two quenched spin-glass free energies even in the replica
symmetric framework
Equilibrium statistical mechanics on correlated random graphs
Biological and social networks have recently attracted enormous attention
between physicists. Among several, two main aspects may be stressed: A non
trivial topology of the graph describing the mutual interactions between agents
exists and/or, typically, such interactions are essentially (weighted)
imitative. Despite such aspects are widely accepted and empirically confirmed,
the schemes currently exploited in order to generate the expected topology are
based on a-priori assumptions and in most cases still implement constant
intensities for links. Here we propose a simple shift in the definition of
patterns in an Hopfield model to convert frustration into dilution: By varying
the bias of the pattern distribution, the network topology -which is generated
by the reciprocal affinities among agents - crosses various well known regimes
(fully connected, linearly diverging connectivity, extreme dilution scenario,
no network), coupled with small world properties, which, in this context, are
emergent and no longer imposed a-priori. The model is investigated at first
focusing on these topological properties of the emergent network, then its
thermodynamics is analytically solved (at a replica symmetric level) by
extending the double stochastic stability technique, and presented together
with its fluctuation theory for a picture of criticality. At least at
equilibrium, dilution simply decreases the strength of the coupling felt by the
spins, but leaves the paramagnetic/ferromagnetic flavors unchanged. The main
difference with respect to previous investigations and a naive picture is that
within our approach replicas do not appear: instead of (multi)-overlaps as
order parameters, we introduce a class of magnetizations on all the possible
sub-graphs belonging to the main one investigated: As a consequence, for these
objects a closure for a self-consistent relation is achieved.Comment: 30 pages, 4 figure
Criticality in diluted ferromagnet
We perform a detailed study of the critical behavior of the mean field
diluted Ising ferromagnet by analytical and numerical tools. We obtain
self-averaging for the magnetization and write down an expansion for the free
energy close to the critical line. The scaling of the magnetization is also
rigorously obtained and compared with extensive Monte Carlo simulations. We
explain the transition from an ergodic region to a non trivial phase by
commutativity breaking of the infinite volume limit and a suitable vanishing
field. We find full agreement among theory, simulations and previous results.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figure
Quantum Phase Interference in Magnetic Molecular Clusters
The Landau Zener model has recently been used to measure very small tunnel
splittings in molecular clusters of Fe8, which at low temperature behaves like
a nanomagnet with a spin ground state of S = 10. The observed oscillations of
the tunnel splittings as a function of the magnetic field applied along the
hard anisotropy axis are due to topological quantum interference of two tunnel
paths of opposite windings. Transitions between quantum numbers M = -S and (S -
n), with n even or odd, revealed a parity effect which is analogous to the
suppression of tunnelling predicted for half integer spins. This observation is
the first direct evidence of the topological part of the quantum spin phase
(Berry or Haldane phase) in a magnetic system. We show here that the quantum
interference can also be measured by ac susceptibility measurements in the
thermal activated regime.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, conference proceedings of LT22 (Helsinki,
Finland, August 4-11, 199
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