Statistical mechanics of biomolecular condensates via cavity methods.

Physical mechanisms of phase separation in living systems play key physiological roles and have recently been the focus of intensive studies. The strongly heterogeneous nature of such phenomena poses difficult modeling challenges that require going beyond mean-field approaches based on postulating a free energy landscape. The pathway we take here is to calculate the partition function starting from microscopic interactions by means of cavity methods, based on a tree approximation for the interaction graph.

Adaptive Properties of the Genetically Encoded Amino Acid Alphabet Are Inherited from Its Subsets.

Life uses a common set of 20 coded amino acids (CAAs) to construct proteins. This set was likely canonicalized during early evolution; before this, smaller amino acid sets were gradually expanded as new synthetic, proofreading and coding mechanisms became biologically available. Many possible subsets of the modern CAAs or other presently uncoded amino acids could have comprised the earlier sets.