🍩 Database of Original & Non-Theoretical Uses of Topology

(found 7 matches in 0.001777s)

  2. Persistent Homology Analysis of Osmolyte Molecular Aggregation and Their Hydrogen-Bonding Networks (2019)

    Kelin Xia, D. Vijay Anand, Saxena Shikhar, Yuguang Mu
    Abstract Dramatically different properties have been observed for two types of osmolytes, i.e., trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) and urea, in a protein folding process. Great progress has been made in revealing the potential underlying mechanism of these two osmolyte systems. However, many problems still remain unsolved. In this paper, we propose to use the persistent homology to systematically study the osmolytes’ molecular aggregation and their hydrogen-bonding network from a global topological perspective. It has been found that, for the first time, TMAO and urea show two extremely different topological behaviors, i.e., an extensive network and local clusters, respectively. In general, TMAO forms highly consistent large loop or circle structures in high concentrations. In contrast, urea is more tightly aggregated locally. Moreover, the resulting hydrogen-bonding networks also demonstrate distinguishable features. With a concentration increase, TMAO hydrogen-bonding networks vary greatly in their total number of loop structures and large-sized loop structures consistently increase. In contrast, urea hydrogen-bonding networks remain relatively stable with slight reduction of the total loop number. Moreover, the persistent entropy (PE) is, for the first time, used in characterization of the topological information of the aggregation and hydrogen-bonding networks. The average PE systematically increases with the concentration for both TMAO and urea, and decreases in their hydrogen-bonding networks. But their PE variances have totally different behaviors. Finally, topological features of the hydrogen-bonding networks are found to be highly consistent with those from the ion aggregation systems, indicating that our topological invariants can characterize intrinsic features of the “structure making” and “structure breaking” systems.

  4. Persistent Homology Analysis of Ion Aggregations and Hydrogen-Bonding Networks (2018)

    Kelin Xia
    Abstract Despite the great advancement of experimental tools and theoretical models, a quantitative characterization of the microscopic structures of ion aggregates and their associated water hydrogen-bonding networks still remains a challenging problem. In this paper, a newly-invented mathematical method called persistent homology is introduced, for the first time, to quantitatively analyze the intrinsic topological properties of ion aggregation systems and hydrogen-bonding networks. The two most distinguishable properties of persistent homology analysis of assembly systems are as follows. First, it does not require a predefined bond length to construct the ion or hydrogen-bonding network. Persistent homology results are determined by the morphological structure of the data only. Second, it can directly measure the size of circles or holes in ion aggregates and hydrogen-bonding networks. To validate our model, we consider two well-studied systems, i.e., NaCl and KSCN solutions, generated from molecular dynamics simulations. They are believed to represent two morphological types of aggregation, i.e., local clusters and extended ion networks. It has been found that the two aggregation types have distinguishable topological features and can be characterized by our topological model very well. Further, we construct two types of networks, i.e., O-networks and H2O-networks, for analyzing the topological properties of hydrogen-bonding networks. It is found that for both models, KSCN systems demonstrate much more dramatic variations in their local circle structures with a concentration increase. A consistent increase of large-sized local circle structures is observed and the sizes of these circles become more and more diverse. In contrast, NaCl systems show no obvious increase of large-sized circles. Instead a consistent decline of the average size of the circle structures is observed and the sizes of these circles become more and more uniform with a concentration increase. As far as we know, these unique intrinsic topological features in ion aggregation systems have never been pointed out before. More importantly, our models can be directly used to quantitatively analyze the intrinsic topological invariants, including circles, loops, holes, and cavities, of any network-like structures, such as nanomaterials, colloidal systems, biomolecular assemblies, among others. These topological invariants cannot be described by traditional graph and network models.

  5. Using Persistent Homology and Dynamical Distances to Analyze Protein Binding (2016)

    Violeta Kovacev-Nikolic, Peter Bubenik, Dragan Nikolić, Giseon Heo
    Abstract Persistent homology captures the evolution of topological features of a model as a parameter changes. The most commonly used summary statistics of persistent homology are the barcode and the persistence diagram. Another summary statistic, the persistence landscape, was recently introduced by Bubenik. It is a functional summary, so it is easy to calculate sample means and variances, and it is straightforward to construct various test statistics. Implementing a permutation test we detect conformational changes between closed and open forms of the maltose-binding protein, a large biomolecule consisting of 370 amino acid residues. Furthermore, persistence landscapes can be applied to machine learning methods. A hyperplane from a support vector machine shows the clear separation between the closed and open proteins conformations. Moreover, because our approach captures dynamical properties of the protein our results may help in identifying residues susceptible to ligand binding; we show that the majority of active site residues and allosteric pathway residues are located in the vicinity of the most persistent loop in the corresponding filtered Vietoris-Rips complex. This finding was not observed in the classical anisotropic network model.

  7. Topological Extraction and Tracking of Defects in Crystal Structures (2011)

    Sebastian Grottel, Carlos A. Dietrich, João L. D. Comba, Thomas Ertl
    Abstract Interfaces between materials with different mechanical properties play an important role in technical applications. Nowadays molecular dynamics simulations are used to observe the behavior of such compound materials at the atomic level. Due to different atom crystal sizes, dislocations in the atom crystal structure occur once external forces are applied, and it has been observed that studying the change of thesedislocations can provide further understanding of macroscopic attributes like elasticity and plasticity. Standard visualization techniques such as the rendering of individual atoms work for 2D data or sectional views; however, visualizingdislocations in 3D using such methods usually fail due to occlusion and clutter. In this work we propose to extract and visualize the structure ofdislocations, which summarizes the commonly employed filtered atomistic renderings into a concise representation. The benefits of our approach are clearer images while retaining relevant data and easier visual tracking of topological changes over time.