In primary (light chain-associated) amyloidosis, immunoglobulin light chains deposit as amyloid fibrils in vital organs, especially the kidney. Because the kidney contains high concentrations of urea that can destabilize light chains as well as solutes such as betaine and sorbitol that serve as protein stabilizers, we investigated the effects of these solutes on in vitro amyloid fibril formatio...

Conditions for thermodynamic stability of asymptotically anti-de Sitter rotating black holes in D-dimensions are determined. Local thermodynamic stability requires not only positivity conditions on the specific heat and the moment of inertia tensor but it is also necessary that the adiabatic compressibility be positive. It is shown that, in the absence of a cosmological constant, neither rotati...

Loop length and its composition are important for the structural and functional versatility of quadruplexes. To date studies on the loops have mainly concerned model sequences compared with naturally occurring quadruplex sequences which have diverse loop lengths and compositions. Herein, we have characterized 36 quadruplex-forming sequences from the promoter regions of various proto-oncogenes u...

Antibody variable domains vary widely in their intrinsic thermodynamic stability. Despite the mutual stabilization of the domains in the scFv fragment, most scFv derived from monoclonal antibodies without further engineering show poor to moderate stability. The situation gets more complex for Fab fragments and full-sized antibodies: while the disulfide-linked C(L)/C(H) heterodimer shows very li...

It is well known that colloids can show phase transitions similar to the ones observed in molecular systems. Colloid-diluted and colloid-concentrated phases can coexist in thermodynamic equilibrium at certain conditions. In a previous work, the authors of this research have used this concept to study petroleum emulsions stability, applying thermodynamic perturbation theories to calculate a phas...

Accumulated experimental observations demonstrate that protein stability is often preserved upon conservative point mutation. In contrast, less is known about the effects of large sequence or structure changes on the stability of a particular fold. Almost completely unknown is the degree to which stability of different regions of a protein is generally preserved throughout evolution. In this wo...

Quantum chemical calculations combined with statistical thermodynamic computations expose the electronic structure and high thermodynamic stability of Dy(2)@C(100), a D(5)-symmetric endohedral metallofullerene.

One loop field theory calculations of free energies quite often yield violations of the stability conditions usually associated with the thermodynamic second law. Perhaps the best known example involves the equation of state of black holes. Here, it is pointed out that the Casimir force between two parallel conducting plates also violates a thermodynamic stability condition normally associated ...