Typologie d'actualités: Team Theoretical and Computational Biophysics

How the hydrothermal environment of Primeval Earth may have influenced the choice of sugar in DNA and RNA

CBM scientists give answers in a publication published in the Journal Nature Communications. Why is Furanose the only sugar found in the composition of DNA and RNA while this form of sugar is not the most stable, so not the most abundant, in temperature conditions and pressure we are currently experiencing? These are the hydrothermal sources, omnipresent on the surface of the primitive land, and their complex thermal influence, which could be at the origin of this selectivity. This study conducted by scientists from the Molecular Biophysics Center, which is the subject of an article in the Nature Communications journal, should make it possible to better understand why and how molecules come together to give life in a primitive geological context.

Reference

Avinash Vicholous Dass, Thomas Georgelin, Frances Westall, Frédéric Foucher, Paolo De Los Rios, Daniel Maria Busiello, Shiling Liand & Francesco Piazza
Equilibrium and non-equilibrium furanose selection in the ribose isomerisation network
Nature Communications, 12 2749 (2021) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22818-5

See the news on the site of the Institute of Chemistry

 




Does your ten-year-old code still run?

Computers have become indispensible tools in scientific research, and software is increasingly becoming a medium for expressing scientific models and methods. But contrary to journal articles, which are archived and remain accesssible for many decades, software is fragile and can become unusable within a few years.

CBM researcher Konrad Hinsen and computer scientists Nicolas Rougier from INRIA Bordeaux Sud-Ouest have launched a challenge to computational scientists: Can you still run code that you published at least ten years ago?

In response, the journal ReScience C, which they founded in 2015, received 28 submissions of detailed reproducibility reports, which have been summarized by a journalist for Nature.

ADOC Symposium – July 5, 2019 – CNRS Orléans

The association of doctoral students of the Center for Molecular Biophysics (ADOC) is organizing its 17th scientific symposium on Friday, July 5, 2019, whose theme is "Science Together".

This conference will take place in the amphitheater Charles Sadron CNRS.

Consult the event website

Poster

Programm

inscriptions

PhD students and post-docs are invited to present their work during a poster session. To be sent an abstract before June 25, 2019, preferentially in English (French tolerated), as well as the title and the names of the authors at the following address: cbmadoc@cnrs-orleans.fr

 

 

A new interpretation of neutron scattering spectra

The article presents a new interpretation of neutron scattering spectra by molecular systems that has much in common with the Franck-Condon theory describing the vibrational transitions in a molecule after absorption or emission of a photon. The principal elements are the quantum probabilities for the transitions between the energy levels of the studied system, which are induced by diffusion of a neutron. In this case, the fundamental concept of "energy landscapes", which was introduced by Hans Frauenfelder to describe the internal dynamics of proteins in terms of "jumps" between the minima of their (free) internal energy, can be integrated in the analysis of neutron scattering spectra by complex systems in general. The theory also provides an intuitive physical interpretation of Van Hove's correlation functions in the quantum regime, as well as their classical limit, which is usually considered in the analysis of quasi-elastic spectra of neutrons from proteins and other complex molecular systems.