Charles Darwin’s final book on earthworms, 1881

This article focuses on the publication of Darwin’s final book (1881) in the context of Darwin’s larger attempts to resist the habitual anthropocentrism of human beings. It begins with Darwin’s discussion of animal cognition and the senses of worms. It concludes with his emphasis on the significant effects worm digestion has on the landscape and the fertility of the earth. The article links Darwin’s Worms Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novella Flatland, arguing that both texts are engaged in dismantling human perceptions that stem from possessing a highly visual brain, and that both throw doubt on the belief that a single objective world exists independent of particular observers.http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=anna-henchman-charles-darwins-final-book-on-earthworms-1881http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=anna-henchman-charles-darwins-final-book-on-earthworms-1881Published versio

Tallow candles and meaty air in Bleak House

In Charles Dickens’s Bleak House there is a strange (and disgusting) pattern of characters feeling that they can ‘taste’ the air, and that that air tastes either meaty or greasy. Esther notices that snuffing ‘two great office candles in tin candlesticks’ at Mrs Jellyby’s ‘made the room taste strongly of hot tallow’, the mutton or beef fat out of which inexpensive candles were made. In Bleak House, candles retain their sheepy atmospheres and release them into the surrounding air when consumed. Mrs Jellyby’s home and Mr Vholes’s office are just two places in which Dickens suggests that the process of turning organic animal bodies into urban commodities (candles, parchment, wigs) has not quite been completed. Candles and parchment are part animal, part object, and they constantly threaten to revert back into their animal forms. The commodification of animal bodies occurs primarily in the city, where parts of formerly living bodies are manufactured into things. Filled with the smell of burning chops or a spontaneously combusted human, Dickens’s greasier atmospheres contain animal matter suspended in the air that the characters smell, taste, and touch. Once we realize that the apparent smell of chops and candles is, in fact, Krook’s body, this act of taking the air becomes a form of cannibalism that is at least as unsettling as Michael Pollan’s recent account of cows being fed cow parts in factory farms. Drawing on this insight and on Allen MacDuffie’s analyses of energy systems in Bleak House, this article focuses on instances in which Dickens defamiliarizes the human consumption of energy by having his characters unintentionally ingest animal particles. Studying Dickens’s treatment of animal fat suspended in air adds a new dimension to recent work on systems of energy expenditure and exchange in an age of industrial capitalism

Thermodynamic Origin of Differential Excipient-Lysozyme Interactions

Understanding the intricate interplay of interactions between proteins, excipients, ions and water is important to achieve the effective purification and stable formulation of protein therapeutics. The free energy of lysozyme interacting with two kinds of polyanionic excipients, citrate and tripolyphosphate, together with sodium chloride and TRIS-buffer, are analysed in multiple-walker metadynamics simulations to understand why tripolyphosphate causes lysozyme to precipitate but citrate does not. The resulting multiscale decomposition of energy and entropy components for water, sodium chloride, excipients and lysozyme reveals that lysozyme is more stabilised by the interaction of tripolyphosphate with basic residues. This is accompanied by more sodium ions being released into solution from tripolyphosphate than for citrate, whilst the latter instead has more water molecules released into solution. Even though lysozyme aggregation is not directly probed in this study, these different mechanisms are suspected to drive the cross-linking between lysozyme molecules with vacant basic residues, ultimately leading to precipitation

Energy-entropy prediction of octanol–water logP of SAMPL7 N-acyl sulfonamide bioisosters

From Springer Nature via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: received 2021-03-04, accepted 2021-06-17, registration 2021-06-18, pub-print 2021-07, pub-electronic 2021-07-10, online 2021-07-10Publication status: PublishedFunder: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000266; Grant(s): EP/L015218/1, EP/N025105/1Abstract: Partition coefficients quantify a molecule’s distribution between two immiscible liquid phases. While there are many methods to compute them, there is not yet a method based on the free energy of each system in terms of energy and entropy, where entropy depends on the probability distribution of all quantum states of the system. Here we test a method in this class called Energy Entropy Multiscale Cell Correlation (EE-MCC) for the calculation of octanol–water logP values for 22 N-acyl sulfonamides in the SAMPL7 Physical Properties Challenge (Statistical Assessment of the Modelling of Proteins and Ligands). EE-MCC logP values have a mean error of 1.8 logP units versus experiment and a standard error of the mean of 1.0 logP units for three separate calculations. These errors are primarily due to getting sufficiently converged energies to give accurate differences of large numbers, particularly for the large-molecule solvent octanol. However, this is also an issue for entropy, and approximations in the force field and MCC theory also contribute to the error. Unique to MCC is that it explains the entropy contributions over all the degrees of freedom of all molecules in the system. A gain in orientational entropy of water is the main favourable entropic contribution, supported by small gains in solute vibrational and orientational entropy but offset by unfavourable changes in the orientational entropy of octanol, the vibrational entropy of both solvents, and the positional and conformational entropy of the solute