Related papers: Crowded Charges in Ion Channels
Hydrogen bonding to chloride ions has been frequently discussed over the past 5 decades. Still, the possible role of such secondary intermolecular bonding interactions in hydrogen bonded networks has not been investigated in any detail.…
Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…
Membranes are ubiquitous in nature with primary functions that include adaptive filtering and selective transport of chemical and molecular species. Being critical to cellular functions, they are also fundamental in many areas of science…
Ion-conducting glasses and polymer systems show several characteristic peculiarities in their composition-dependent diffusion properties and in their dynamic response. First we give a brief review of the current understanding of the ion…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
We calculate the ion distributions around an interface in fluid mixtures of highly polar and less polar fluids (water and oil) for two and three ion species. We take into account the solvation and image interactions between ions and…
Ionic liquids are promising candidates for electrolytes in energy-storage systems. We demonstrate that mixing two ionic liquids allows to precisely tune their physical properties, like the dc conductivity. Moreover, these mixtures enable…
The molecular biology revolution of the last seventy five years has transformed our view of living systems. Scientific explanations of biological phenomena are now synonymous with the identification of the genes, proteins, and signaling…
The association of ions in electrolyte solutions at very low concentration and low temperature is studied using computer simulations and quasi-chemical ion-pairing theory. The specific case of the restricted primitive model (charged hard…
We consider an anisotropically two-dimensional diffusion of a charged molecule (particle) through a large biological channel under an external voltage. The channel is modeled as a cylinder of three structure parameters: radius, length, and…
We investigate the outflux of ions through the channels in a cell membrane. The channels undergo an open/close cycle according to a periodic schedule. Our study is based both on theoretical considerations relying on homogenization theory,…
Ions in ionic liquids and concentrated electrolytes reside in a crowded, strongly-interacting environment, leading to the formation of discrete layers of charges at interfaces. Here, we propose a continuum theory that captures the…
The molecular mechanism of ion channel gating and substrate modulation is elusive for many voltage gated ion channels, such as eukaryotic sodium ones. The understanding of channel functions is a pressing issue in molecular biophysics and…
Recent molecular simulation and integral equation results alkali-halide ion pair potentials-of-mean-force in water are discussed. Dielectric model calculations are implemented to check that these models produce that characteristic structure…
Potassium and sodium ions are crucial for many physiological processes in living systems and play different roles when interacting with proteins and enzymes. Intracellular concentration of potassium is always maintained higher than that of…
Recent advances in experimental and computational techniques have allowed for an accurate description of the adsorption of ionic liquids on metallic electrodes. It is now well established that they adopt a multi-layered structure, and that…
Virtually all cells use energy and ion-specific membrane pumps to maintain large transmembrane gradients of Na$^+$, K$^+$, Cl$^-$, Mg$^{++}$, and Ca$^{++}$. Although they consume up to 1/3 of a cell's energy budget, the corresponding…
We extend the concept that life is an informational phenomenon, at every level of organisation, from molecules to the global ecological system. According to this thesis: (a) living is information processing, in which memory is maintained by…
Electromagnetic radiation (photons) or particle beam (protons or heavy ions) have similar biological effects, i.e. damage to human cell DNA that eventually leads to cell death if not correctly repaired. The biological effects at the level…
Physicists study a wide variety of phenomena creating new interdisciplinary research fields by applying theories and methods originally developed in physics in order to solve problems in economics, social science, biology, medicine,…