Formation of Single and Multiple Deformation Twins in Nanocrystalline fcc Metals

Deformation twins are often observed to meet each other to form multi-fold twins in nanostructured face-centered cubic (fcc) metals.Here we propose two types of mechanism for the nucleation and growth of four different single and multiple twins. These mechanisms provide continuous generation of twinning partials for the growth of the twins after ucleation. A relatively high stress or high strain rate is needed to activate these mechanisms, making them more prevalent in nanocrystalline materials than in their coarse-grained counterparts.Experimental observations that support the proposed mechanisms are presented.

A scheme for multiple sequences alignment optimization-an improvement based on family representative mechanics features

As a basic tool of modern biology, sequence alignment can provide us useful information in fold, function, and active site of protein. For many cases, the increased quality of sequence alignment means a better performance. The motivation of present work is to increase ability of the existing scoring scheme/algorithm by considering residue–residue correlations better. Based on a coarse-grained approach, the hydrophobic force between each pair of residues is written out from protein sequence. It results in the construction of an intramolecular hydrophobic force network that describes the whole residue–residue interactions of each protein molecule, and characterizes protein's biological properties in the hydrophobic aspect. A former work has suggested that such network can characterize the top weighted feature regarding hydrophobicity. Moreover, for each homologous protein of a family, the corresponding network shares some common and representative family characters that eventually govern the conservation of biological properties during protein evolution. In present work, we score such family representative characters of a protein by the deviation of its intramolecular hydrophobic force network from that of background. Such score can assist the existing scoring schemes/algorithms, and boost up the ability of multiple sequences alignment, e.g. achieving a prominent increase (50%) in searching the structurally alike residue segments at a low identity level. As the theoretical basis is different, the present scheme can assist most existing algorithms, and improve their efficiency remarkably.