Discoveries and advances in plant and animal genomics.

Plant and animal genomics is a broad area of research with respect to the biological issues covered because it continues to deal with the structure and function of genetic material underpinning all organisms. This mini-review utilizes the plenary lectures from the Plant and Animal Genome Conference as a basis for summarizing the trends in the genome-level studies of organisms.

Climate policy to defeat the green paradox.

Carbon dioxide emissions have accelerated since the signing of the Kyoto Protocol. This discouraging development may partly be blamed on accelerating world growth and on lags in policy instruments. However, it also raises serious question concerning whether policies to reduce CO2 emissions are as effective as generally assumed.

Bottom-up derivation of an effective thermostat for united atoms simulations of water.

In this article we derive the effective pairwise interactions in a Langevin-type united atoms model of water. The interactions are determined from the trajectories of a detailed molecular dynamics simulation of simple point charge water. A standard method is used for estimating the conservative interaction, whereas a new "bottom-up" method is used to determine the effective dissipative and stochastic interactions.

A method for estimating the interactions in dissipative particle dynamics from particle trajectories.

We introduce a method for determining the functional form of the stochastic and dissipative interactions in a dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) model from projected phase space trajectories. The DPD model is viewed as a coarse graining of a detailed dynamics that displays a clear timescale separation. Based on the Mori-Zwanzig projection operator method we derive a consistency equation for the stochastic interaction in DPD.

Effective thermostat induced by coarse graining of simple point charge water.

We investigate how the transport properties of a united atom fluid with a dissipative particle dynamics thermostat depend on the functional form and magnitude of both the conservative and the stochastic interactions. We demonstrate how the thermostat strongly affects the hydrodynamics, especially diffusion, viscosity, and local escape times. As model system we use simple point charge (SPC) water, from which projected trajectories are used to determine the effective interactions in the united atom model.

Using force covariance to derive effective stochastic interactions in dissipative particle dynamics.

There exist methods for determining effective conservative interactions in coarse-grained particle-based mesoscopic simulations. The resulting models can be used to capture thermal equilibrium behavior, but the model system we study does not correctly represent transport properties. We suggest the use of force covariance to determine the full functional form of dissipative and stochastic interactions.