http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov – Neurons that sense touch, sound and acceleration respond rapidly to specific mechanical signals. The proteins that transduce these signals and underlie these senses, however, are mostly unknown. Research over the past decade has suggested that members of three families of channel proteins are candidate transduction molecules. Current studies are directed towards characterizing these candidates, determining how they are mechanically gated and discovering new molecules that are involved in mechanical sensing. Read more »

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov – In this paper, we propose a method for realtime estimation of whole-body muscle tensions. The main problem of muscle tension estimation is that there are infinite number of solutions to realize a particular joint torque due to the actuation redundancy. Numerical optimization techniques, e.g. quadratic programming, are often employed to obtain a unique solution, but they are usually computationally expensive. For example, our implementation of quadratic programming takes about 0.17 sec per frame on the musculoskeletal model with 274 elements, which is far from realtime computation. Read more »

http://www.sciencedirect.com – Molecular dynamics simulated annealing (SA-MD) simulations are frequently used for refinement and optimization of peptide and protein structures. Depending on the simulation conditions and simulation length SA-MD simulations can be trapped in locally stable conformations far from the global optimum. As an alternative replica exchange molecular dynamics (RexMD) simulations can be used which allow exchanges between high and low simulation temperatures at all stages of the simulation. Read more »

http://pubs.acs.org – t has recently been shown that protein structures can be determined from nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) chemical shifts using a molecular fragment replacement strategy. In these approaches, structural motifs are selected from existing protein structures on the basis of chemical shift and sequence homology and assembled to generate new structures. Read more »