Related papers: Electronic Properties of Eumelanin Monomers and Di…
Melanins are a group of complex pigments of biological origin, widely spread in all species from fungi to man. Among diverse types of melanins, the human melanins, eumelanins,are brown or black nitrogen-containing pigments, mostly known for…
The melanins are a ubiquitous class of pigments found throughout nature from lower organisms to humans. It is one of the few biopolymers with fascinating functions in biology, medicine, chemistry, physics and engineering due to its relation…
We discuss recent progress towards the establishment of important structure-property-function relationships in eumelanins - key functional bio-macromolecular systems responsible for photo-protection and immune response in humans, and…
Eumelanin is regarded to be an attractive candidate material for biomedical applications. Despite many theoretical studies exploring the structure of eumelanin, an exact mapping of the energetic landscape of the very large phase space of…
This work presents conclusive observations about the long lasting topic of eumelanins' electronic vs. ionic conduction, allowing to access unprecedented conductivity of this mammal pigment. Key strengths of the study include, the easy…
Biological membranes mainly consist of lipids and proteins. While the proteins have many functions as single molecules, the membrane as a whole displays physical properties that cannot be explained on the single molecule level. For example,…
This study investigates optical and electrical properties of thin melanin films self-organized grown from water solutions of eumelanin extracted from edible plants. The melanin films exhibit the characteristics of a transparent low…
Melanosomes are organelles found in a wide variety of tissues throughout the animal kingdom. They contain a variety of biological molecules, but the dominant constituent is the pigment melanin, and many functions ascribed to melanosomes,…
We present results from the theoretical INDO calculations of the electronic structure for stacked eumelanins' monomers. As basic indolic components of the eumelanin structure 5,6-dihydroxyindole (DHI or HQ) and its oxidized forms (SQ and…
Living cells are soft bodies of a characteristic form, but endowed with a capacity for a steady turnover of their structures. Both of these material properties, i.e. recovery of the shape after an external stress has been imposed and…
We report the results of an experimental and theoretical study of the electronic and structural properties of a key eumelanin precursor - 5,6,-dihydroxyindole-2-carboxylic acid (DHICA) and its dimeric forms. We have used optical…
The spontaneous oxidation of dopamine in slightly alkaline solutions was investigated on the basis of the work of Lee and others [Science, 318:426-430, 2007], and the reaction product was identified as dopamine-melanin. The ability of…
Protein-mediated interactions are ubiquitous in the cellular environment, and particularly in the nucleus, where they are responsible for the structuring of chromatin. We show through molecular--dynamics simulations of a polymer surrounded…
The state of chromatin in individual cells is directly related to the state of the whole organism and may be used for assessment of the state of the whole organism. Many hereditary diseases are connected with chromatin rearrangements.…
Melanins are promising materials for organic bioelectronics devices like transistors, sensors and batteries. However, in general, melanin either natural or synthetic has low solubility in most solvents. In this study, the chemical…
Lamina-associated domains (LADs) cover a large part of the human genome and are thought to play a major role in shaping the nuclear architectural landscape. Here, we perform polymer simulations, microscopy and mass spectrometry to dissect…
The rational assembly of monomers, in principle, enables the design of a specific periodicity of polymeric frameworks, leading to a tailored set of electronic structure properties in these solid-state materials. The further development of…
We consider collisional properties of weakly bound heteronuclear molecules (dimers) formed in a two-species mixture of atoms with a large mass difference. We focus on dimers containing light fermionic atoms as they manifest collisional…
Decomposition of skin pigment plays an important role in medical fields. Human skin can be decomposed into two primitive components, hemoglobin and melanin. It is our goal to apply these results for diagnosis of skin cancer. In this paper,…
Eukaryotic DNA is packaged into chromatin: one-dimensional arrays of nucleosomes separated by stretches of linker DNA are folded into 30-nm chromatin fibers which in turn form higher-order structures. Each nucleosome, the fundamental unit…