Non-Equilibrium Surface Tension of the Vapour-Liquid Interface of Active Lennard-Jones Particles

We study a three-dimensional system of self-propelled Brownian particles interacting via the Lennard-Jones potential. Using Brownian Dynamics simulations in an elongated simulation box, we investigate the steady states of vapour-liquid phase coexistence of active Lennard-Jones particles with planar interfaces. We measure the normal and tangential components of the pressure tensor along the direction perpendicular to the interface and verify mechanical equilibrium of the two coexisting phases. In addition, we determine the non-equilibrium interfacial tension by integrating the difference of the normal and tangential component of the pressure tensor, and show that the surface tension as a function of strength of particle attractions is well-fitted by simple power laws. Finally, we measure the interfacial stiffness using capillary wave theory and the equipartition theorem, and find a simple linear relation between surface tension and interfacial stiffness with a proportionality constant characterized by an effective temperature.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures (Corrected typos and References

Improving protein fold recognition using the amalgamation of evolutionary-based and structural-based information

Deciphering three dimensional structure of a protein sequence is a challenging task in biological science. Protein fold recognition and protein secondary structure prediction are transitional steps in identifying the three dimensional structure of a protein. For protein fold recognition, evolutionary-based information of amino acid sequences from the position specific scoring matrix (PSSM) has been recently applied with improved results. On the other hand, the SPINE-X predictor has been developed and applied for protein secondary structure prediction. Several reported methods for protein fold recognition have only limited accuracy. In this paper, we have developed a strategy of combining evolutionary-based information (from PSSM) and predicted secondary structure using SPINE-X to improve protein fold recognition. The strategy is based on finding the probabilities of amino acid pairs (AAP). The proposed method has been tested on several protein benchmark datasets and an improvement of 8.9% recognition accuracy has been achieved. We have achieved, for the first time over 90% and 75% prediction accuracies for sequence similarity values below 40% and 25%, respectively. We also obtain 90.6% and 77.0% prediction accuracies, respectively, for the Extended Ding and Dubchak and Taguchi and Gromiha benchmark protein fold recognition datasets widely used for in the literature

A mixture of physicochemical and evolutionary–based feature extraction approaches for protein fold recognition

Griffith Sciences, Griffith School of EngineeringFull Tex

Protein fold recognition by alignment of amino acid residues using kernelized dynamic time warping

In protein fold recognition, a protein is classified into one of its folds. The recognition of a protein fold can be done by employing feature extraction methods to extract relevant information from protein sequences and then by using a classifier to accurately recognize novel protein sequences. In the past, several feature extraction methods have been developed but with limited recognition accuracy only. Protein sequences of varying lengths share the same fold and therefore they are very similar (in a fold) if aligned properly. To this, we develop an amino acid alignment method to extract important features from protein sequences by computing dissimilarity distances between proteins. This is done by measuring distance between two respective position specific scoring matrices of protein sequences which is used in a support vector machine framework. We demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method on several benchmark datasets. The method shows significant improvement in the fold recognition performance which is in the range of 4.3–7.6% compared to several other existing feature extraction methods

Exploring Cognitive States: Methods for Detecting Physiological Temporal Fingerprints

Cognitive state detection and its relationship to observable physiologically telemetry has been utilized for many human-machine and human-cybernetic applications. This paper aims at understanding and addressing if there are unique psychophysiological patterns over time, a physiological temporal fingerprint, that is associated with specific cognitive states. This preliminary work involves commercial airline pilots completing experimental benchmark task inductions of three cognitive states: 1) Channelized Attention (CA); 2) High Workload (HW); and 3) Low Workload (LW). We approach this objective by modeling these "fingerprints" through the use of Hidden Markov Models and Entropy analysis to evaluate if the transitions over time are complex or rhythmic/predictable by nature. Our results indicate that cognitive states do have unique complexity of physiological sequences that are statistically different from other cognitive states. More specifically, CA has a significantly higher temporal psychophysiological complexity than HW and LW in EEG and ECG telemetry signals. With regards to respiration telemetry, CA has a lower temporal psychophysiological complexity than HW and LW. Through our preliminary work, addressing this unique underpinning can inform whether these underlying dynamics can be utilized to understand how humans transition between cognitive states and for improved detection of cognitive states

Protein fold recognition using an overlapping segmentation approach and a mixture of feature extraction models

Protein Fold Recognition (PFR) is considered as a critical step towards the protein structure prediction problem. PFR has also a profound impact on protein function determination and drug design. Despite all the enhancements achieved by using pattern recognition-based approaches in the protein fold recognition, it still remains unsolved and its prediction accuracy remains limited. In this study, we propose a new model based on the concept of mixture of physicochemical and evolutionary features. We then design and develop two novel overlapping segmented-based feature extraction methods. Our proposed methods capture more local and global discriminatory information than previously proposed approaches for this task. We investigate the impact of our novel approaches using the most promising attributes selected from a wide range of physicochemical-based attributes (117 attributes) which is also explored experimentally in this study. By using Support Vector Machine (SVM) our experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement (up to 5.7%) in the protein fold prediction accuracy compared to previously reported results found in the literature

Enhancing protein fold prediction accuracy using evolutionary and structural features

Protein fold recognition (PFR) is considered as an important step towards the protein structure prediction problem. It also provides crucial information about the functionality of the proteins. Despite all the efforts that have been made during the past two decades, finding an accurate and fast computational approach to solve PFR still remains a challenging problem for bioinformatics and computational biology. It has been shown that extracting features which contain significant local and global discriminatory information plays a key role in addressing this problem. In this study, we propose the concept of segmented-based feature extraction technique to provide local evolutionary information embedded in Position Specific Scoring Matrix (PSSM) and structural information embedded in the predicted secondary structure of proteins using SPINE-X. We also employ the concept of occurrence feature to extract global discriminatory information from PSSM and SPINE-X. By applying a Support Vector Machine (SVM) to our extracted features, we enhance the protein fold prediction accuracy to 7.4% over the best results reported in the literature

Predict gram - positive and gram - negative subcellular localization via incorporating evolutionary information and physicochemical features into Chou’s general PseAAC

In this study, we used structural and evolutionary based features to represent the sequences of gram-positive and gram-negative subcellular localizations. To do this, we proposed a normalization method to construct a normalize Position Specific Scoring Matrix (PSSM) using the information from original PSSM. To investigate the effectiveness of the proposed method we compute feature vectors from normalize PSSM and by applying Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Naïve Bayes classifier, respectively, we compared achieved results with the previously reported results. We also computed features from original PSSM and normalized PSSM and compared their results. The archived results show enhancement in gram-positive and gram-negative subcellular localizations. Evaluating localization for each feature, our results indicate that employing SVM and concatenating features (amino acid composition feature, Dubchak feature (physicochemical-based features), normalized PSSM based auto-covariance feature and normalized PSSM based bigram feature) have higher accuracy while employing Naïve Bayes classifier with normalized PSSM based auto-covariance feature proves to have high sensitivity for both benchmarks. Our reported results in terms of overall locative accuracy is 84.8% and overall absolute accuracy is 85.16% for gram-positive dataset; and, for gram- negative dataset, overall locative accuracy is 85.4% and overall absolute accuracy is 86.3%

Protein fold recognition using HMM–HMM alignment and dynamic programming

Detecting three dimensional structures of protein sequences is a challenging task in biological sciences. For this purpose, protein fold recognition has been utilized as an intermediate step which helps in classifying a novel protein sequence into one of its folds. The process of protein fold recognition encompasses feature extraction of protein sequences and feature identification through suitable classi- fiers. Several feature extractors are developed to retrieve useful information from protein sequences. These features are generally extracted by constituting protein’s sequential, physicochemical and evolutionary properties. The performance in terms of recognition accuracy has also been gradually improved over the last decade. However, it is yet to reach a well reasonable and accepted level. In this work, we first applied HMM–HMM alignment of protein sequence from HHblits to extract profile HMM (PHMM) matrix. Then we computed the distance between respective PHMM matrices using kernalized dynamic programming. We have recorded significant improvement in fold recognition over the state-of-the-art feature extractors. The improvement of recognition accuracy is in the range of 2.7–11.6% when experimented on three benchmark datasets from Structural Classification of Proteins