Plants have developed sophisticated mechanisms to survive when in unfavorable environments. Autophagy is a macromolecule degradation pathway that recycles damaged or unwanted cell materials upon encountering stress conditions or during specific developmental processes. Over the past decade, our molecular and physiological understanding of plant autophagy has greatly increased. Most of the essen...

Structural motions along a reaction pathway hold the secret about how a biological macromolecule functions. If each static structure were considered as a snapshot of the protein molecule in action, a large collection of structures would constitute a multidimensional conformational space of an enormous size. Here I present a joint analysis of hundreds of known structures of human hemoglobin in t...

in the form (1 -6p) where c, is the concentration of macromolecule at radius Y, R is the gas constant, T is the temperature, 6 is the partial specific volume of the macromolecule, p is the solution density and w is the angular velocity. This assumes that the partial specific volume required is that for the unsolvated macromolecule and also involves the solution density, which is frequently not ...

We consider the kinetics of first contact between two monomers of the same macromolecule. Relying on a fractal description of the macromolecule, we develop an analytical method to compute the mean first contact time for various molecular sizes. In our theoretical description, the non-Markovian feature of monomer motion, arising from the interactions with the other monomers, is captured by accou...