Jahn-Teller Effect and Spin-Orbit Coupling: Friends or Foes?

Spin-orbit coupling and the Jahn-Teller effect: vibronic and spin-vibronic angular momenta

The concept of symmetry and its breaking holds a special and important place in the physical sciences. One of the best known examples of such symmetry breaking is the Jahn-Teller effect. In their original paper, Jahn and Teller demonstrated(Jahn & Teller 1937) that a symmetry-dictated electronic degeneracy will always be raised by a non-totally symmetric distortion linear in nuclear coordinates...

Phytoestrogens. Friends or foes?

BioInformatics Pipeline Alternative Splicing Services (BIPASS) offer support to scientists interested in gathering information related to alternative splicing (AS) events. The service BIPAS–SpliceDB provides access to AS information that has been extracted a priori from various public databases and stored in a data warehouse. In contrast, the BIPAS– Align&Splice service allows scientists to sub...

Dynamic spin Jahn-Teller effect in small magnetic clusters

We study the effect of spin-phonon coupling in small magnetic clusters, concentrating on a S=1/2 ring of 4 spins coupled antiferromagnetically. If the phonons are treated as classical variables, there is a critical value of the spin-phonon coupling above which a static distortion occurs. This is a good approximation if the zero point energy is small compared to the energy gain due to the distor...

Beta-agonists--friends or foes?

Bacterial toxins: friends or foes?

Many emerging and reemerging bacterial pathogens synthesize toxins that serve as primary virulence factors. We highlight seven bacterial toxins produced by well-established or newly emergent pathogenic microbes. These toxins, which affect eukaryotic cells by a variety of means, include Staphylococcus aureus alpha-toxin, Shiga toxin, cytotoxic necrotizing factor type 1, Escherichia coli heat-sta...