Seasonal Biomass and Carbohydrate Allocation Patterns in Southern Minnesota Curlyleaf Pondweed Populations

Four southern Minnesota populations of curlyleaf pondweed ( Potamogeton crispus L.) were sampled monthly from January 2001 to November 2002 to determine seasonal phenological, biomass, and carbohydrate allocation patterns. Low periods of carbohydrate storage in the seasonal phenological cycle indicate potentially vulnerable periods in the plant’s life cycle and may be the ideal time to initiate management and control efforts

Rapid Determination of Multiple Reaction Pathways in Molecular Systems: The Soft-Ratcheting Algorithm

We discuss the ``soft-ratcheting'' algorithm which generates targeted stochastic trajectories in molecular systems with scores corresponding to their probabilities. The procedure, which requires no initial pathway guess, is capable of rapidly determining multiple pathways between known states. Monotonic progress toward the target state is not required. The soft-ratcheting algorithm is applied to an all-atom model of alanine dipeptide, whose unbiased trajectories are assumed to follow overdamped Langevin dynamics. All possible pathways on the two-dimensional dihedral surface are determined. The associated probability scores, though not optimally distributed at present, may provide a mechanism for estimating reaction rates

Festschrift in the Honor of Stephen H. White’s 70th Birthday

The Symposium ‘Frontiers in membrane and membrane protein biophysics: experiments and theory’, held this year at the University of California, Irvine (August 19–20), celebrated the 70th Birthday of Stephen H. White by bringing together distinguished experimentalists and theoreticians to discuss the state of the art and future challenges in the field of membrane and membrane protein biophysics. The meeting and this special issue highlight the highly interdisciplinary nature of membrane and membrane protein biophysics, and the tremendous contributions that S. H. White and his lab have brought to the field