In the background of virtual teaching and conferencing, our story on the first-passage fingerprints of diffusive dynamics has been featured on the back cover of Soft Matter 16, 2020.

Showcasing research from Professor Roldán’s and Professor Hassanali’s laboratories, ICTP – The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy.

First-passage fingerprints of water diffusion near glutamine surfaces

First-passage time statistics of water molecules carries information about their interaction with proteins. This information allows the reconstruction of water’s space-dependent mobility near protein surfaces, through a synergy of molecular dynamics and stochastic theory. The picture illustrates the fluctuating motion (yellow trajectory) of a single water molecule and the time elapsed (clock) for the molecule to reach a crystalline surface.