First-order to second-order phase transition changeover and latent heats of q-state Potts models in d=2,3 from a simple Migdal-Kadanoff adaptation.

The changeover from first-order to second-order phase transitions in q-state Potts models is obtained at q_{c}=2 in spatial dimension d=3 and essentially at q_{c}=4 in d=2, using a physically intuited simple adaptation of the Migdal-Kadanoff renormalization-group transformation. This simple procedure yields the latent heats at the first-order phase transitions. In both d=2 and 3, the calculated phase transition temperatures, respectively compared with the exact self-duality and Monte Carlo results, are dramatically improved.

Evolutionary association of receptor-wide amino acids with G protein-coupling selectivity in aminergic GPCRs.

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) induce signal transduction pathways through coupling to four main subtypes of G proteins (G, G, G, and G), selectively. However, G protein selective activation mechanisms and residual determinants in GPCRs have remained obscure. Herein, we performed extensive phylogenetic analysis and identified specifically conserved residues for the aminergic receptors having similar coupling profiles.

FFCASP: A Massively Parallel Crystal Structure Prediction Algorithm.

A new algorithm called Fast and Flexible CrystAl Structure Predictor (FFCASP) was developed to predict the structure of covalent and molecular crystals. FFCASP is massively parallel and able to handle more than 200 atoms in the unit cell (in other terms, it allows global optimization around 100 individual parameters). It uses a global optimizer specialized for Crystal Structure Prediction (CSP) which combines particle swarm and simulated annealing optimizers.