Emergence of highly-designable protein-backbone conformations in an off-lattice model

Despite the variety of protein sizes, shapes, and backbone configurations found in nature, the design of novel protein folds remains an open problem. Within simple lattice models it has been shown that all structures are not equally suitable for design. Rather, certain structures are distinguished by unusually high designability: the number of amino-acid sequences for which they represent the unique ground state; sequences associated with such structures possess both robustness to mutation and thermodynamic stability. Here we report that highly designable backbone conformations also emerge in a realistic off-lattice model. The highly designable conformations of a chain of 23 amino acids are identified, and found to be remarkably insensitive to model parameters. While some of these conformations correspond closely to known natural protein folds, such as the zinc finger and the helix-turn-helix motifs, others do not resemble known folds and may be candidates for novel fold design.Comment: 7 figure

Morphology and thermal conductivity of model organic aerogels

The intersection volume of two independent 2-level cut Gaussian random fields is proposed to model the open-cell microstructure of organic aerogels. The experimentally measured X-ray scattering intensity, surface area and solid thermal conductivity of both polymeric and colloidal organic aerogels can be accounted for by the model.Comment: 5 pages. RevTex with 4 encapsulated figures. Higher resolution figures have been submitted for publication. To be published in Phys. Rev. E (Rapid Comm.). email, [email protected]

Explore Air Quality from NASA Satellite Data

Space-borne earth observation has been important to monitor the earth condition and played acritical role in validating other instruments or modeling's outputs. However, the data from satellite earth observation are usually very complex in terms of science contents, formats, and spatiotemporal granularities, making them difficult to use from many aspects. NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC), one of the 12 official NASA data centers, archives and distributes rich collections of data from multiple satellite missions and model results. The GES DISC is also the official archive center for data from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) aboard NASA's Aura mission since 2004. Recently, the GES DISChas been evolving and improving its data management and services in order to promote NASA data to be easily discovered and accessed, as well as to facilitate interoperability. We'll show in this presentation how to explore and analyze NASA earth observation data for air quality through a suite of user-friendly tools - from Giovanni to ArcGIS, demonstrating in using this set of tools prepares us to serve the Sentinel 5P TROPOMI to the community

BsB_s Semileptonic Decays to DsD_s and Ds∗D_s^* in Bethe-Salpeter Method

Using the relativistic Bethe-Salpeter method, the electron energy spectrum and the semileptonic decay widths of $B^0_s\to D^-_s \ell^+{\nu_\ell}$ and $B^0_s\to D_s^{*-}\ell^+{\nu_\ell}$ are calculated. We obtained large branching ratios, $Br(B_s\to D_se\nu_e)=(2.85\pm0.35)$ and $Br (B_s\to D_s^*e\nu_e)=(7.09\pm0.88)$, which can be easily detected in the future experiment.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures

High-Order Coupled Cluster Method Calculations for the Ground- and Excited-State Properties of the Spin-Half XXZ Model

In this article, we present new results of high-order coupled cluster method (CCM) calculations, based on a N\'eel model state with spins aligned in the $z$-direction, for both the ground- and excited-state properties of the spin-half {\it XXZ} model on the linear chain, the square lattice, and the simple cubic lattice. In particular, the high-order CCM formalism is extended to treat the excited states of lattice quantum spin systems for the first time. Completely new results for the excitation energy gap of the spin-half {\it XXZ} model for these lattices are thus determined. These high-order calculations are based on a localised approximation scheme called the LSUB$m$ scheme in which we retain all $k$-body correlations defined on all possible locales of $m$ adjacent lattice sites ($k \le m$). The ``raw'' CCM LSUB$m$ results are seen to provide very good results for the ground-state energy, sublattice magnetisation, and the value of the lowest-lying excitation energy for each of these systems. However, in order to obtain even better results, two types of extrapolation scheme of the LSUB$m$ results to the limit $m \to \infty$ (i.e., the exact solution in the thermodynamic limit) are presented. The extrapolated results provide extremely accurate results for the ground- and excited-state properties of these systems across a wide range of values of the anisotropy parameter.Comment: 31 Pages, 5 Figure