Cooperative protein allosteric transition mediated by a fluctuating transmission network

Allosteric communication between distant protein sites represents a key mechanism of biomolecular regulation and signal transduction. Compared to other processes such as protein folding, however, the dynamical evolution of allosteric transitions is still not well understood. As example of allosteric coupling between distant protein regions, we consider the global open-closed motion of the two domains of T4 lysozyme, which is triggered by local motions in the hinge region. Combining extensive molecular dynamics simulations with machine learning of contact features, we identify a network of interresidue distances that move in a concerted manner. The cooperative process originates from a cogwheel-like motion of the hydrophobic core in the hinge region, which constitutes a flexible transmission network. Through rigid contacts and the protein backbone, the small local changes of the hydrophobic core are passed on to the distant terminal domains and lead to the emergence of a rare global conformational transition. As in an Ising-type model, the cooperativity of the allosteric transition can be explained via the interaction of local fluctuations.

Building Perspective-Taking as an Organizational Capability: A Change Intervention in a Health Care Setting

Perspective-taking, or engaging with the viewpoints of others, has been linked to a range of positive and negative interpersonal outcomes. However, it has only been researched infrequently in organizations, and questions remain about how it might be developed as a multidimensional cooperative process and problem-solving capability more widely. To better understand this, this article presents findings from a 2-year change intervention with 10 US hospitals. Interview data from three time points (393 interviews, 197 staff members) reveal dimensions and levels of understanding underpinning the development of organizational perspective-taking. Actors’ accounts suggested several major interrelated dimensions of perspective-taking operating at local and system levels, through affective concern, cognitive understanding, and motivational efforts to improve the sharing and interpretation of diverse perspectives. The study has implications for how organizations can better foster perspective-taking by building ecological structures and processes that assemble perspectives supportively, holistically, and frequently.

ToAM: a task-oriented authentication model for UAVs based on blockchain

The pervasive cooperation of a group of UAVs has attracted increasing attention due to the reduced cost and widespread availability. When working in an untrusted or adversarial environment, the mutual authentication of UAVs in the cooperative process is imperative. However, there are some major challenges, including changes in the network environment before and during task performing, and the weak connection network state faced by UAVs. Therefore, a novel task-oriented authentication model for UAVs based on blockchain (ToAM) is proposed, which divides UAVs authentication into group building authentication and intra-group authentication with a two-stage authentication framework. And two lightweight authentication protocols are presented, respectively, corresponding to two stages. Finally, analyses demonstrate that our model realizes secure and lightweight authentication function for the whole process of UAVs requisition and task performing.

Contract Theory-Based Incentive Mechanism for Full Duplex Cooperative NOMA with SWIPT Communication Networks

Cooperative Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) with Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer (SWIPT) communication can effectively improve the spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency of the wireless networks with extend coverage. An important design issue is to incentivize a relaying center user to participate in the cooperative process and achieve a win-win situation to both the BS and the center user. Some private information of the center users are hidden from the BS in the networks. We apply a contract theory-based incentive mechanism under such asymmetric information scenario to incentives center user to join the cooperative communication to maximize the BS profit utility and to guarantee the center user’s expect payoff. A match theory-based Gale-Shapley algorithm is proposed to obtain the optimal strategy with low computation complexity. Simulation results indicated the network performance of our proposed cooperative transmission is much better than the conventional NOMA transmission and the benefit utility of the BS with the stable match strategy is nearly close to the complete channel state information multi-users scenario while the center users get the satisfied expect payoffs.

MATERIAL SELECTION AS COOPERATIVE PROCESS: A FRAMEWORK PROPOSAL FOR A CHANGING ECONOMY

In current era of Anthropocene, human activities and their consequences on Earth ecosystems are under the lens of scientific research. Researchers in every field of study are trying to find alternatives to promote sustainable development. So it is for design, where researchers exploiting the problem-framing and problem-solving nature of the design discipline itself, trying to find new methodologies and tools to enhance sustainable development.One of the most important tasks in the design for a sustainable production is focused on material selection. In this paper, authors will present a reflection upon material selection methods and an overview of existing material repositories. Traditionally, material selection is usually attributed to designers or technical professionals but nowadays information concurring in materials selection became a complex task to manage. Therefore, authors propose a case study concerning information management upon materials and their selection presented in a new possible approach: material selection as a collaborative task between several departments of an industrial company, to promote an aware information management activity upon materials.

THE DETECTION OF BIMODE STATES FROM DEAF CAVITY THROUGH IONIZATION METHOD OF THE ATOMIC STATES

The equations of motion for the Raman and hyper-Raman conversion effect of atomic polarization are presented. At the same time, an experimental scheme previously used in the micromaser is proposed, which allows the determination of the number of atoms in the excited or in the ground state using the ionization method from the deaf cavity. Therefore, a method is proposed to link the number of atoms that have passed in the basic state of the induced-cooperative process of Stokes-type photon transformation in anti-Stokes (AS) photons in the case of Raman emission (RE) (following the micromaser model) or the transformation of photon pairs in the case of hyper-Raman emission (HRE)/

Construction and Application of Comprehensive Evaluation Index System for Long-Term Cooperation Between Enterprises, Universities and Research Institutes

In the process of industry-university-research institute cooperation, it is of vital significance to construct a set of comprehensive evaluation index system which can objectively and effectively reflect the performance of industry-university-research institute cooperation for promoting the long-term cooperation among the three parties. This paper regards industry-university-research institute cooperation as an input-output system, and constructs a comprehensive evaluation index system which includes four first-level indexes of initial input, cooperative process, cooperative output and re-input. On this basis, a reasonable evaluation model is constructed to comprehensively evaluate the performance of industry-university-research cooperation from three aspects: cooperation scale, cooperation efficiency and cooperation sustainability.

Mutual anticipation can contribute to self-organization in human crowds

Human crowds provide paradigmatic examples of collective behavior emerging through self-organization. Understanding their dynamics is crucial to help manage mass events and daily pedestrian transportation. Although recent findings emphasized that pedestrians’ interactions are fundamentally anticipatory in nature, whether and how individual anticipation functionally benefits the group is not well understood. Here, we show the link between individual anticipation and emergent pattern formation through our experiments of lane formation, where unidirectional lanes are spontaneously formed in bidirectional pedestrian flows. Manipulating the anticipatory abilities of some of the pedestrians by distracting them visually delayed the collective pattern formation. Moreover, both the distracted pedestrians and the nondistracted ones had difficulties avoiding collisions while navigating. These results imply that avoidance maneuvers are normally a cooperative process and that mutual anticipation between pedestrians facilitates efficient pattern formation. Our findings may influence various fields, including traffic management, decision-making research, and swarm dynamics.

Turn Trash into Treasure Recycling Children's Books

Children’s books disposed from the libraries can be trash, but in great varieties, once they are recycled properly, they will be treasure. There are thousands of children’s books disposed from the public libraries in the US due to different kind of reasons, through these years with careful handling, they become useful collections for the children of countries, where English is a major foreign language. They also have become valuable learning materials in schools and in the public libraries in Taiwan.In 1999, an earthquake stroke Taiwan and caused severe damages in the Central part of Taiwan. Many schools suffered from the damages. This tragedy brought in much concerns and donations from all over the world. North America Taiwan Women Association (NATWA) visited the damaged area and found that school libraries were in extreme need of help. In addition to monetary donation, NATWA realized the spiritual healing is as important as reconstruction process, therefore in 2004 NATWA launched “Turn Trash into Treasure Recycling Children’s Books” program mainly collecting off-shelf children’s books from American public libraries and shipped books to Taiwan, where the books are mostly in need. Geographically the recycling children’s books are mostly collected from about 45 public libraries in the Northern New Jersey area.This paper presents how the project was initiated and promoted, so as programs were designed to make maximum utilization of the recycled children’s books. Summarize statistical status of the project as well as cooperative process during the past four years.

Mechanism of pore opening in the calcium-activated chloride channel TMEM16A

The anion channel TMEM16A is activated by intracellular Ca2+ in a highly cooperative process. By combining electrophysiology and autocorrelation analysis, we investigated the mechanism of channel activation and the concurrent rearrangement of the gate in the narrow part of the pore. Features in the fluctuation characteristics of steady-state current indicate the sampling of intermediate conformations that are successively occupied during gating. The initial step is related to conformational changes induced by Ca2+ binding, which is ensued by rearrangements that open the pore. Mutations in the gate shift the equilibrium of transitions in a manner consistent with a progressive destabilization of this region during pore opening. We come up with a mechanism of channel activation where the binding of Ca2+ induces conformational changes in the protein that, in a sequential manner, propagate from the binding site and couple to the gate in the narrow pore to allow ion permeation.