65,430 research outputs found
Complexation of DNA with positive spheres: phase diagram of charge inversion and reentrant condensation
The phase diagram of a water solution of DNA and oppositely charged spherical
macroions is studied. DNA winds around spheres to form beads-on-a-string
complexes resembling the chromatin 10 nm fiber. At small enough concentration
of spheres these "artificial chromatin" complexes are negative, while at large
enough concentrations of spheres the charge of DNA is inverted by the adsorbed
spheres. Charges of complexes stabilize their solutions. In the plane of
concentrations of DNA and spheres the phases with positive and negative
complexes are separated by another phase, which contains the condensate of
neutral DNA-spheres complexes. Thus when the concentration of spheres grows,
DNA-spheres complexes experience condensation and resolubilization (or
reentrant condensation). Phenomenological theory of the phase diagram of
reentrant condensation and charge inversion is suggested. Parameters of this
theory are calculated by microscopic theory. It is shown that an important part
of the effect of a monovalent salt on the phase diagram can be described by the
nontrivial renormalization of the effective linear charge density of DNA wound
around a sphere, due to the Onsager-Manning condensation. We argue that our
phenomenological phase diagram or reentrant condensation is generic to a large
class of strongly asymmetric electrolytes. Possible implication of these
results for the natural chromatin are discussed.Comment: Many corrections to text. SUbmitted to J. Chem. Phy
Modelling Citation Networks
The distribution of the number of academic publications as a function of
citation count for a given year is remarkably similar from year to year. We
measure this similarity as a width of the distribution and find it to be
approximately constant from year to year. We show that simple citation models
fail to capture this behaviour. We then provide a simple three parameter
citation network model using a mixture of local and global search processes
which can reproduce the correct distribution over time. We use the citation
network of papers from the hep-th section of arXiv to test our model. For this
data, around 20% of citations use global information to reference recently
published papers, while the remaining 80% are found using local searches. We
note that this is consistent with other studies though our motivation is very
different from previous work. Finally, we also find that the fluctuations in
the size of an academic publication's bibliography is important for the model.
This is not addressed in most models and needs further work.Comment: 29 pages, 22 figure
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HLA-B27 Positivity: associated health implications
HLA-B27 positivity makes the onset of autoimmune diseases such as uveitis, ankylosing spondylitis and Crohn's disease more likely to occur. Ankylosing spondylitis and Crohn's disease are two types of HLA-B27 positive diseases that demonstrate a direct association with uveitis. Although the possession of HLA-B27 positivity is not mandatory for autoimmune diseases such as uveitis to occur, HLA-B27 positivity not only makes it more likely but may modify the clinical picture in which a patient presents. In relation to assessment and diagnosis it is imperative that the medical history of patients is thoroughly examined to ensure pathological sequelae are appropriately treated. Nurses play an important role in assessing patients that have uveitis and should suspect ankylosing spondylitis or Crohn's disease may be present
Keplerian discs around post-AGB stars: a common phenomenon?
Aims: We aim at showing that the broad-band SED characteristics of our sample
of post-AGB stars are best interpreted, assuming the circumstellar dust is
stored in Keplerian rotating passive discs.
Methods: We present a homogeneous and systematic study of the Spectral Energy
Distributions (SEDs) of a sample of 51 post-AGB objects. The selection criteria
to define the whole sample were tuned to cover the broad-band characteristics
of known binary post-AGB stars. The whole sample includes 20 dusty RV Tauri
stars from the General Catalogue of Variable Stars (GCVS). We supplemented our
own Geneva optical photometry with literature data to cover a broad range of
fluxes from the UV to the far-IR.
Results: All the SEDs display very similar characteristics: a large IR excess
with a dust excess starting near the sublimation temperature, irrespective of
the effective temperature of the central star. Moreover, when available, the
long wavelength fluxes show a black-body slope indicative of the presence of a
component of large mm sized grains.
Conclusions: We argue that in all systems, gravitationally bound dusty discs
are present. The discs must be puffed-up to cover a large opening angle for the
central star and we argue that the discs have some similarity with the passive
discs detected around young stellar objects. We interpret the presence of a
disc to be a signature for binarity of the central object, but this will need
confirmation by long-term monitoring of the radial velocities. We argue that
dusty RV Tauri stars are those binaries which happen to be in the Population II
instability strip.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in A&
Marginalising instrument systematics in HST WFC3 transit lightcurves
Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) infrared observations
at 1.1-1.7m probe primarily the HO absorption band at 1.4m, and
has provided low resolution transmission spectra for a wide range of
exoplanets. We present the application of marginalisation based on Gibson
(2014) to analyse exoplanet transit lightcurves obtained from HST WFC3, to
better determine important transit parameters such as R/R, important
for accurate detections of HO. We approximate the evidence, often referred
to as the marginal likelihood, for a grid of systematic models using the Akaike
Information Criterion (AIC). We then calculate the evidence-based weight
assigned to each systematic model and use the information from all tested
models to calculate the final marginalised transit parameters for both the
band-integrated, and spectroscopic lightcurves to construct the transmission
spectrum. We find that a majority of the highest weight models contain a
correction for a linear trend in time, as well as corrections related to HST
orbital phase. We additionally test the dependence on the shift in spectral
wavelength position over the course of the observations and find that
spectroscopic wavelength shifts , best describe the
associated systematic in the spectroscopic lightcurves for most targets, while
fast scan rate observations of bright targets require an additional level of
processing to produce a robust transmission spectrum. The use of
marginalisation allows for transparent interpretation and understanding of the
instrument and the impact of each systematic evaluated statistically for each
dataset, expanding the ability to make true and comprehensive comparisons
between exoplanet atmospheres.Comment: 19 pages, 13 figures, 8 tables, Accepted to Ap
An Ising-Like model for protein mechanical unfolding
The mechanical unfolding of proteins is investigated by extending the
Wako-Saito-Munoz-Eaton model, a simplified protein model with binary degrees of
freedom, which has proved successful in describing the kinetics of protein
folding. Such a model is generalized by including the effect of an external
force, and its thermodynamics turns out to be exactly solvable. We consider two
molecules, the 27th immunoglobulin domain of titin and protein PIN1. In the
case of titin we determine equilibrium force-extension curves and study
nonequilibrium phenomena in the frameworks of dynamic loading and force clamp
protocols, verifying theoretical laws and finding the position of the kinetic
barrier which hinders the unfolding of the molecule. The PIN1 molecule is used
to check the possibility of computing the free energy landscape as a function
of the molecule length by means of an extended form of the Jarzynski equality.Comment: 4 pages + appendi
Hard rod gas with long-range interactions: Exact predictions for hydrodynamic properties of continuum systems from discrete models
One-dimensional hard rod gases are explicitly constructed as the limits of
discrete systems: exclusion processes involving particles of arbitrary length.
Those continuum many-body systems in general do not exhibit the same
hydrodynamic properties as the underlying discrete models. Considering as
examples a hard rod gas with additional long-range interaction and the
generalized asymmetric exclusion process for extended particles (-ASEP),
it is shown how a correspondence between continuous and discrete systems must
be established instead. This opens up a new possibility to exactly predict the
hydrodynamic behaviour of this continuum system under Eulerian scaling by
solving its discrete counterpart with analytical or numerical tools. As an
illustration, simulations of the totally asymmetric exclusion process
(-TASEP) are compared to analytical solutions of the model and applied to
the corresponding hard rod gas. The case of short-range interaction is treated
separately.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figure
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