Self-organized criticality and color vision: A guide to water-protein landscape evolution

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• 作者：J.C. Phillips ^{jcphillips8@comcast.net}
• 关键词：Scaling ; Vision ; Self-organized criticality ; Color discrimination ; Gauge-dependent similarity ; Smoothness ; Water
• 刊名：Physica A
• 出版年：2013
• 出版时间：1 February, 2013
• 年：2013
• 卷：392
• 期：3
• 页码：468-473
• 全文大小：507 K

文摘

We focus here on the scaling properties of small interspecies differences between red cone opsin transmembrane proteins, using a hydropathic elastic roughening tool previously applied to the rhodopsin rod transmembrane proteins. This tool is based on a non-Euclidean hydropathic metric realistically rooted in the atomic coordinates of 5526 protein segments, which thereby encapsulates universal non-Euclidean long-range differential geometrical features of water films enveloping globular proteins in the Protein Data Bank. Whereas the rhodopsin blue rod water films are smoothest in humans, the red cone opsins¡¯ water films are optimized for smoothness in cats and elephants, consistent with protein species landscapes that evolve differently in different contexts. We also analyze red cone opsins in the chromatophore-containing family of chameleons, snakes, zebrafish and goldfish, where short- and long-range (BLAST and hydropathic) amino acid (aa) correlations are found with values as large as 97 % -99 % . We use hydropathic aa optimization to estimate the maximum number of color shades that the human eye can discriminate, and obtain , in good agreement with experiment.