Despite prolonged scientific efforts to unravel the effects of ions on the structure and dynamics of water, many open questions remain, in particular concerning the spatial extent of this effect (i.e., the number of water molecules affected) and the origin of ion-specific effects. A combined terahertz and femtosecond infrared spectroscopic study of water dynamics around different ions (specific...

Transcription is controlled by promoter-selective factors, which bind to cis-regulatory elements in a specific subset of genes. Regulation by these factors involves direct interactions with the general transcriptional machinery as well as interactions with co-activators and co-repressors. These co-regulators often function by modifying the covalent or non-covalent structure of the chromatin tem...

10 1) Yale Systems Biology Institute and Department of Ecology and 11 Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 06511 USA 12 2) Departments of Chemistry, Pharmacology and Biomedical Informatics; 13 Center for Structural Biology and Institute of Chemical Biology, Vanderbilt 14 University, TN 37232, USA 15 3) Department of Human Genetics, The University of Chicago, 920 E. 58th 16 Stre...

Although phenomenlogical models that account for cooperativity in allosteric systems date back to the early and mid-60's (e.g., the KNF and MWC models), there is resurgent interest in the topic due to the recent experimental and computational studies that attempted to reveal, at an atomistic level, how allostery actually works. In this review, using systems for which atomistic simulations have ...

Title of Dissertation : ALLOSTERY AND GROEL: EXPLORING THE TENETS OF NESTED COOPERATIVITY Jennifer Suzanne Gresham, Doctor of Philosophy, 2004 Dissertation Directed By: Professor George H. Lorimer Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Despite a wealth of structural and biochemical studies on the functional cycle of the E. coli chaperonins GroEL and GroES, no model proposed to date accounts f...

What is the importance of cooperativity? That depends on the system, but let’s take hemoglobin. Hemoglobin’s mission is to pick up a large amount of oxygen in the lungs, where the oxygen concentration (or partial pressure) is about 100 torr, and then drop off a good fraction of it in the peripheral tissues where the oxygen concentration is about 20 torr. Cooperativity helps make this transport ...

What is the importance of cooperativity? That depends on the system, but let’s take hemoglobin. Hemoglobin’s mission is to pick up a large amount of oxygen in the lungs, where the oxygen concentration (or partial pressure) is about 100 torr, and then drop off a good fraction of it in the peripheral tissues where the oxygen concentration is about 20 torr. Cooperativity helps make this transport ...

Micro-organisms, whether the prokaryotic Myxococcus or the eukaryotic amoeba Dictyostelium, can achieve an impressive level of multicellular cooperativity and it is revealing to ask how this came to be and how it differs from the cooperativity found in animal development. This is not a sterile exercise that begins and ends with speculation – there is a usefulness, a utility to evolutionary theo...