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The interplay of membrane proteins is vital for many biological processes, such as cellular transport, cell division, and signal transduction between nerve cells. Theoretical considerations have led to the idea that the membrane itself…
How the geometry of nano-sized confinement affects dynamics of biomaterials is interesting yet poorly understood. An elucidation of structural details upon nano-sized confinement may benefit manufacturing pharmaceuticals in biomaterial…
We review here the physics of capillary condensation of liquids in confined media, with a special regard to the application in nanotechnologies. The thermodynamics of capillary condensation and thin film adsorption are first exposed along…
Most proteins perform their biological function by interacting with one or more molecular partners. In this respect, characterizing the features of the molecular surface, especially in the portions where the interaction takes place, turned…
How do living cells achieve sufficient abundances of functional protein complexes while minimizing promiscuous non-functional interactions? Here we study this problem using a first-principle model of the cell whose phenotypic traits are…
We report on the interaction of pulmonary surfactant composed of phospholipids and proteins with nanometric alumina (Al2O3) in the context of lung exposure and nanotoxicity. We study the bulk properties of phospholipid/nanoparticle…
It is a standard exercise in mechanical engineering to infer the external forces and torques on a body from its static shape and known elastic properties. Here we apply this kind of analysis to distorted double-helical DNA in complexes with…
We examine the structure of compact metal nanoparticles (NPs) forming polyhedral sections of face centered (fcc) and body centered (bcc) cubic lattices, which are confined by facets characterized by highly dense {100}, {110}, and {111}…
This work exploits the zeptoliter sensing volume of electrolyte-filled nanopores to determine, simultaneously and in real time, the approximate shape, volume, charge, rotational diffusion coefficient, and dipole moment of individual…
Protein-Protein Interactions (PPIs) perform essential roles in biological functions. Although some experimental techniques have been developed to detect PPIs, they suffer from high false positive and high false negative rates. Consequently,…
The idea that structural disorder might be a novel mechanism of protein interaction is widespread in the Literature, although the number of statistically significant structural studies supporting this is surprisingly low. At variance with…
Correlated motions of proteins underpin many physiological mechanisms, such as substrate binding, signal transduction, enzymatic activity and allostery. These motions arise from low frequency collective movements of biomolecules and have…
Weak interactions form the core basis of a vast number of biological processes, in particular, those involving intrinsically disordered proteins. Here, we establish a new technique capable of probing these weak interactions between…
The histone-DNA interaction in the nucleosome is a fundamental mechanism of genomic compaction and regulation, which remains largely unkown despite a growing structural knowledge of the complex. Here, we propose a framework for the…
The state of protonation/deprotonation of surfaces has far-ranging implications in all areas of chemistry: from acid-base catalysis$^1$ and the electro- and photocatalytic splitting of water$^2$, to the behavior of minerals$^3$ and…
Water plays a major role in bio-systems, greatly contributing to determine their structure, stability and even function. It is well know, for instance, that proteins require a minimum amount of water to be functionally active. Since the…
The Histone-like Nucleoid Structuring protein (H-NS) is a nucleoid-associated protein, which is involved in both gene regulation and DNA compaction. H-NS can bind to DNA in two different ways: in trans, by binding to two separate DNA…
The growing interest for comparing protein internal dynamics owes much to the realization that protein function can be accompanied or assisted by structural fluctuations and conformational changes. Analogously to the case of functional…
Biological nanoparticles (BNPs) are of high interest due to their key role in various biological processes and use as biomarkers. BNP size and molecular composition are decisive for their functions, but simultaneous determination of both…
We study a large data set of protein structure ensembles of very diverse sizes determined by nuclear magnetic resonance. By examining the distance-dependent correlations in the displacement of residues pairs and conducting finite size…