Punctuated bursts in human male demography inferred from 1,244 worldwide Y-chromosome sequences.

We report the sequences of 1,244 human Y chromosomes randomly ascertained from 26 worldwide populations by the 1000 Genomes Project. We discovered more than 65,000 variants, including single-nucleotide variants, multiple-nucleotide variants, insertions and deletions, short tandem repeats, and copy number variants. Of these, copy number variants contribute the greatest predicted functional impact.

Similarity-driven discovery of zeolite materials for adsorption-based separations.

Crystalline porous materials can be exploited in many applications. Discovery of materials with optimum adsorption properties typically involves expensive brute-force characterization of large sets of materials. An alternative approach based on similarity searching that enables discovery of materials with optimum adsorption for CO(2) and other molecules at a fraction of the cost of brute-force characterization is demonstrated.

Molecular simulation of the effect of cholesterol on lipid-mediated protein-protein interactions.

Experiments and molecular simulations have shown that the hydrophobic mismatch between proteins and membranes contributes significantly to lipid-mediated protein-protein interactions. In this article, we discuss the effect of cholesterol on lipid-mediated protein-protein interactions as function of hydrophobic mismatch, protein diameter and protein cluster size, lipid tail length, and temperature. To do so, we study a mesoscopic model of a hydrated bilayer containing lipids and cholesterol in which proteins are embedded, with a hybrid dissipative particle dynamics-Monte Carlo method.