Strong electrostatic attraction drives milk heteroprotein complex coacervation.

Coacervates of oppositely charged milk proteins are used in functional food development, mainly to encapsulate bioactives. To uncover the driving forces behind coacervates formation, we study the association of lactoferrin and β-lactoglobulin at amino-acid level detail, using molecular simulations. Our findings show that inter-protein electrostatic interactions dominate and are, surprisingly, equally divided between an isotropic part, due to monopole-monopole attraction of the oppositely charged proteins, and an anisotropic part due to uneven surface charge distributions.

Association of duration of treatment on post-discharge mortality in forensic psychiatric patients in Finland.

Background: Longer treatment time has been shown to be associated with lower crime recidivism among forensic psychiatric patients, but it is not known if this applies also to mortality. In this study, we aim to research whether treatment time is associated with risk of post-discharge mortality in Finnish forensic psychiatric patients.

Materials And Methods: The study population consisted of 989 patients committed to compulsory forensic psychiatric hospital treatment in Finland from 1980 to 2009 who were released from care by the end of 2018.

Cluster Formation Induced by Local Dielectric Saturation in Restricted Primitive Model Electrolytes.

Experiments using the Surface Force Apparatus (SFA) have found anomalously long-ranged charge-charge underscreening in concentrated salt solutions. Meanwhile, theory and simulations have suggested ion clustering to be a possible origin of this behavior. The popular Restricted Primitive Model of electrolyte solutions, in which the solvent is represented by a uniform relative dielectric constant, ε, is unable to resolve the anomalous underscreening seen in experiments.

An efficient method to establish electrostatic screening lengths of restricted primitive model electrolytes.

We present a novel, and computationally cheap, way to estimate electrostatic screening lengths from simulations of restricted primitive model (RPM) electrolytes. We demonstrate that the method is accurate by comparisons with simulated long-ranged parts of the charge density, at various Bjerrum lengths, salt concentrations and ion diameters. We find substantial underscreening in low dielectric solvent, but with an "aqueous" solvent, there is instead overscreening, the degree of which increases with ion size.