Highly Charged Proteins: The Achilles' Heel of Aging Proteomes.

As cells and organisms age, their proteins sustain increasing amounts of oxidative damage. It is estimated that half of all proteins are damaged in old organisms, yet the dominant mechanisms by which damage affects proteins and cellular phenotypes are not known. Here, we show that random modification of side chain charge induced by oxidative damage is likely to be a dominant source of protein stability loss in aging cells.

Communication: Maximum caliber is a general variational principle for nonequilibrium statistical mechanics.

There has been interest in finding a general variational principle for non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. We give evidence that Maximum Caliber (Max Cal) is such a principle. Max Cal, a variant of maximum entropy, predicts dynamical distribution functions by maximizing a path entropy subject to dynamical constraints, such as average fluxes.