Thermodynamics is a physical branch of science that governs the thermal behavior of dynamical systems from those as simple as refrigerators to those as complex as our expanding universe. The laws of thermodynamics involving conservation of energy and nonconservation of entropy are, without a doubt, two of the most useful and general laws in all sciences. The first law of thermodynamics, accordi...

We provide a characterization of energy in the form of exchanged heat and work between two interacting constituents of a closed, bipartite, correlated quantum system. By defining a binding energy we derive a consistent quantum formulation of the first law of thermodynamics, in which the role of correlations becomes evident, and this formulation reduces to the standard classical picture in relev...

A simplified interaction potential for protein folding studies at the atomic level is discussed and tested on a set of peptides with approximately 20 residues each. The test set contains both alpha-helical (Trp cage, F(s)) and beta-sheet (GB1p, GB1m2, GB1m3, Betanova, LLM) peptides. The model, which is entirely sequence-based, is able to fold these different peptides for one and the same choice...

The employment of thermodynamics in biochemistry has been restricted, until recently, to the use of first law data. In the last few years a beginning has been made in the application of the second law; i.e., of free energy data (1, 2). The development of this field is limited by the paucity of available free energy data. We have therefore undertaken the systematic determination of the free ener...