In the conventional paradigm of humoral immunity, B cells recognize their cognate antigen target in its native form. However, it is well known that relatively unstable peptides bearing only partial structural resemblance to the native protein can trigger antibodies recognizing higher-order structures found in the native protein. On the basis of sound thermodynamic principles, this work reveals ...

Starting from a generalized nonequilibrium entropy, and from an extension of the Einstein formula for the probability of the fluctuations, we obtain the second moments of nonequilibrium fluctuations of the specific energy and the heat flux in rigid heat conductors. This approach leads to nonequilibrium corrections to the usual fluctuationdissipation expressions for the heat fluctuations. The co...

The calculation of the equilibrium constants K of the sonolysis reactions of CO2 into CO and O atom, the recombination of O atoms into O2 and the formation of H2O starting with H and O atoms, has been studied by means of statistical thermodynamic. The constants have been calculated at 300 kHz versus the pressure and the temperature according to the extreme conditions expected in a cavitation bu...

We developed a primer design method, Pythia, in which state of the art DNA binding affinity computations are directly integrated into the primer design process. We use chemical reaction equilibrium analysis to integrate multiple binding energy calculations into a conservative measure of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) efficiency, and a precomputed index on genomic sequences to evaluate primer s...

Evolution of non-equilibrium systems towards equilibrium is governed by the second law of thermodynamics. For example, in the previous section we showed that for an adia­ batically isolated system entropy must increase in any spontaneous change and reaches a maximum in equilibrium. What about out of equilibrium systems that are not adiabati­ cally isolated and which may also be subject to exter...

When a bit is added to a file, its entropy increases by one nat regardless of the length of the file or the value of the bit. However, when a node is added to a network, the entropy increase is a function of the ratio between the links and the nodes in the network. Therefore, the thermodynamic incentive for a node to join a highly linked network is higher than to join a poorly linked network.