Related papers: Mechanical prions: Self-assembling microstructures
Proteins are inherently multiscale physical systems whose functional properties emerge from coordinated structural organization across multiple spatial resolutions, ranging from atomic interactions to global fold topology. However, existing…
Prion diseases are associated with the misfolding of the normal helical cellular form of prion protein (PrPC) into the beta-sheet-rich scrapie form (PrPSc) and the subsequent aggregation of PrPSc into amyloid fibrils. Recent studies…
How proteins fold remains a central unsolved problem in biology. While the idea of a folding code embedded in the amino acid sequence was introduced more than 6 decades ago, this code remains undefined. While we now have powerful predictive…
Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or using tools. These capabilities are also highly desirable in robots. They are displayed…
In this paper we study the phenomenon of kinetic partitioning when a polypeptide chain has two ground state conformations one of which is more kinetically reachable than the other. This question is relevant to understand the phenomenology…
Traditional robotic mechanisms contain a series of rigid links connected by rotational joints that provide powered motion, all of which is controlled by a central processor. By contrast, analogous mechanisms found in nature, such as octopus…
Many aspects of the study of protein folding and dynamics have been affected by the recent advances in machine learning. Methods for the prediction of protein structures from their sequences are now heavily based on machine learning tools.…
Proteins constitute a large group of macromolecules with a multitude of functions for all living organisms. Proteins achieve this by adopting distinct three-dimensional structures encoded by the sequence of their constituent amino acids in…
Fine robotic assembly, in which the parts to be assembled are small and fragile and lie in an unstructured environment, is still out of reach of today's industrial robots. The main difficulties arise in the precise localization of the parts…
A generalized understanding of protein dynamics is an unsolved scientific problem, the solution of which is critical to the interpretation of the structure-function relationships that govern essential biological processes. Here, we approach…
Proteins, by virtue of their central role in most biological processes, represent one of the key subjects of the study of molecular evolution. Inherent to the indispensability of proteins for living cells is the fact that a given protein…
Micro-appearance models have brought unprecedented fidelity and details to cloth rendering. Yet, these models neglect fabric mechanics: when a piece of cloth interacts with the environment, its yarn and fiber arrangement usually changes in…
Generative artificial intelligence models learn probability distributions from data and produce novel samples that capture the salient properties of their training sets. Proteins are particularly attractive for such approaches given their…
Biological functions in each animal cell depend on coordinated operations of a wide variety of molecular motors. Some of the these motors transport cargo to their respective destinations whereas some others are mobile workshops which…
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…
A general and basic model of primordial evolution--a soup of reacting finitary and discrete processes--is employed to identify and analyze fundamental mechanisms that generate and maintain complex structures in prebiotic systems. The…
Hysterons are elementary units of hysteresis that underlie many complex behaviors of non-equilibrium matter. Because models of interacting hysterons can describe disordered matter, this suggests that artificial systems could respond to…
Composition is a powerful principle for systems biology, focused on the interfaces, interconnections, and orchestration of distributed processes to enable integrative multiscale simulations. Whereas traditional models focus on the structure…
The recent advances in autonomous systems have prompted a strong demand for the next generation of adaptive structures and materials to possess more built-in intelligence in their mechanical domain, the so-called mechano-intelligence (MI).…
Proteins are macromolecules that mediate a significant fraction of the cellular processes that underlie life. An important task in bioengineering is designing proteins with specific 3D structures and chemical properties which enable…