Poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-10%3-hydroxyhexanoate)(PHBHHx) thin films were prepared by means of spin-coating PHBHHx/chloroform solutions on the silicon substrate. The crystalline morphologies of PHBHHx thin films were observed by atomic force microscopy(AFM) at room temperature. A novel crystalline morphology, that is like sunflower was found when the film is very thin and named as sunflower-like crystalline morphology. Compared with usual PHBHHx spherulites, there are obvious differences in aspects of nucleation, crystal growth process and crystalline morphology for the sunflowers. The PHBHHx/chloroform solution properties and the substrate have great effects on the formation of the sunflower. A circular boundary that may result from a liquid-liquid phase separation in PHBHHx solution first formed in the thin film during the spin-coating process, then it induced the formation of the sunflowers.
The crystallization of poly(vinylcyclohexane)-b-poly(ethylene)-b-poly(vinylcyclohexane)(PVCH-PE-PVCH) triblock copolymer/chloroform solution was investigated. The solvent of the solution system was evaporated at various temperatures. It was found that the crystallinity was decreased with increasing the solvent evaporating temperature. This indicated that the crystallinity depends on the crystallization time because the higher the evaporating temperature, the faster the speed of the solvent evaporating is. However, the melting temperature(T_m) of the block copolymer was found to depend on the competition between the crystallization and the microphase separation. When the evaporating temperature is lower(below 333 K), i.e. the speed of the solvent-evaporating is slow, the PE block crystallized freely and the T_m increased with increasing the solvent evaporating temperature, implying that the T_m only depends on the crystalline temperature. On the other hand, with the increasing temperature up to above 343 K for solvent evaporating, two melting peaks at 356 and 377 K were observed for the crystallization of PVCH-PE-PVCH in the solution. It resulted in that the crystallization and the microphase separation of the block copolymer occurred simultaneously. And the confined and unconfined crystallization coexisted for the samples. The competition of the crystallization and the microphase separation can be controlled through changing the solvent evaporating speed.
A network of 3719 tRNA gene sequences was constructed using simplest alignment. Its topology, degree distribution and clustering coefficient were studied. The behaviors of the network shift from fluctuated distribution to scale-free distribution when the similarity degree of the tRNA gene sequences increases. The tRNA gene sequences with the same anticodon identity are more self-organized than those with different anticodon identities and form local clusters in the network. Some vertices of the local cluster have a high connection with other local clusters, and the probable reason was given. Moreover, a network constructed by the same number of random tRNA sequences was used to make comparisons. The relationships between the properties of the tRNA similarity network and the characters of tRNA evolutionary history were discussed.
We have studied sharp peak landscapes of the Eigen model from a new perspective about how the quasispecies are distributed in the sequence space. To analyse the distribution more carefully, we bring in two tools. One tool is the variance of Hamming distance of the sequences at a given generation. It not only offers us a different avenue for accurately locating the error threshold and illustrates how the configuration of the distribution varies with copying fidelity q in the sequence space, but also divides the copying fidelity into three distinct regimes. The other tool is the similarity network of a certain Hamming distance do, by which we can gain a visual and in-depth result about how the sequences axe distributed. We find that there are several local similarity optima around the centre （global similarity optimum） in the distribution of the sequences reproduced near the threshold. Furthermore, it is interesting that the distribution of clustering coefficient C（k） follows lognormal distribution and the curve of clustering coefficient C of the network versus do appears to be linear near the threshold.
The dynamics of two confined colloidal particles is studied by means of Brownian dynamics simulation. The autocorrelation function and cross-correlation function of the two colloidal spheres are computed by utilizing the formulae of hydrodynamic diffusion matrix expanded to different orders, as well as the accurate tensor through numerical algorithm. Furthermore, the numerical results are compared with the experimental results and the theoretical approximation. It is found that the relatively simple theoretical approximation gives good predictions when two spheres are far away from each other, but fails when the two spheres are very close.
