Related papers: Protein structure, activity and thermal stability …
Confinement influences fluid properties. We show, employing molecular dynamics simulations with explicit solvents, that slit confinement drives a first-order transition for a small nanoparticle between staying at the slit center and binding…
Folding and aggregation of proteins, the interaction between proteins and membranes, as well as the adsorption of organic soft matter to inorganic solid substrates belong to the most interesting challenges in understanding structure and…
Reactions at solid-water interfaces play a foundational role in water treatment systems, catalysis, chemical separations, and in predicting chemical fate and transport in the environment. Over the last century, experimental measurements and…
Water's ability to self-dissociate into H$_3$O$^+$ and OH$^-$ ions is central to acid-base chemistry and bioenergetics. Recent experimental advances have enabled the confinement of water down to the nanometre scale, even to the…
Water in nanoscale cavities is ubiquitous and of central importance to everyday phenomena in geology and biology. However, the properties of nanoscale water can be remarkably different from bulk, as shown e.g., by the anomalously low…
Water has many anomalous properties compared to "simple" liquids, and these anomalies are typically enhanced in supercooled water. While numerous models have been proposed, including the liquid-liquid critical point, the singularity-free…
The phase behavior of hydrocarbon fluids confined in porous media has been reported to deviate significantly from that in the bulk environment due to the existence of sub-10nm pores. Though experiments and simulations have measured the…
Understanding heat transfer characteristics of phase change and enhancing thermal energy transport in nanoscale are of great interest in both theoretical and practical applications. In the present study, we investigated the nanoscale…
For several decades, experimental and computational studies have been used to investigate the potential functional role of knots in protein structures. A property that has attracted considerable attention is thermal stability, i.e., the…
We study by Monte Carlo simulations a coarse-grained model of a water layer confined in a fixed disordered matrix of hydrophobic nanoparticles at different particle concentrations c. For c=0 (bulk water) we find a first order liquid-liquid…
Water behaves very differently at surfaces and under extreme confinement, but the boundary between these two regimes has remained unclear. Despite evidence that interfacial effects persist under sub-nanometre confinement, the…
Theories of protein crystallization based on spheres that form close-packed crystals predict optimal assembly within a `slot' of second virial coefficients and enhanced assembly near the metastable liquid-vapor critical point. However, most…
We use Molecular Dynamics simulations to study how the nanopore and the fluid structures affects the dynamic, thermodynamic and structural properties of a confined anomalous fluid. The fluid is modeled using an effective pair potential…
We refine a protein model that reproduces fundamental aspects of protein thermodynamics. The model exhibits two transitions, hot and cold unfolding. The number of relevant parameters is reduced to three: 1) binding energy of folding…
Water plays a crucial role in geological, biological, and technological processes. Nanoscale water confinement occurs in many of these settings, including sedimentary rocks, water channel proteins, and applications like desalination and…
Large scale molecular dynamics simulations are used to investigate the structural and dynamical modifications of supercooled water when confined inside an hydrophilic nanopore. We then investigate the evolution of the auto-organization of…
Equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations are used to investigate the effect of phase transitions on the transport properties of highly-confined water between parallel graphene sheets. An abrupt reduction by several orders of magnitude in…
In a recent paper [PRL 91, 138103 (2003)] a new mechanism to explain the cold denaturation of proteins, based on the loss of local low-density water structure, has been proposed. In the present paper this mechanism is tested by means of…
Liquid crystals have attracted enormous interest because of the variety of their phases and richness of their application. The interplay of general physical symmetries and specific molecular features generates a myriad of different…
Recent experimental and computational studies have demonstrated that nanoconfinement profoundly alters the phase behavior of water, facilitating complex phase transitions at pressures and temperatures far lower than typically observed in…