Biomolecular recognition can be stubborn; changes in the structures of associating molecules, or the environments in which they associate, often yield compensating changes in enthalpies and entropies of binding and no net change in affinities. This phenomenon—termed enthalpy/entropy (H/S) compensation—hinders efforts in biomolecular design, and its incidence—often a surprise to experimentalists—makes interactions between biomolecules difficult to predict. Although characterizing H/S compensation requires experimental care, it is unquestionably a real phenomenon that has, from an engineering perspective, useful physical origins. Studying H/S compensation can help illuminate the still-murky roles of water and dynamics in biomolecular recognition and self-assembly. This review summarizes known sources of H/ S compensation (real and perceived) and lays out a conceptual framework for understanding and dissecting—and, perhaps, avoiding or exploiting—this phenomenon in biophysical systems.

Biochemistry has been broadly defined as “chemistry of molecules included or related to living systems”, but is becoming increasingly hard to be distinguished from other related fields. Targets of its studies evolve rapidly; some newly emerge, disappear, combine, or resurface themselves with a fresh viewpoint. Methodologies for biochemistry have been extremely diversified, thanks particularly to those adopted from molecular biology, synthetic chemistry, and biophysics. Therefore, this paper adopts topic modeling, a text mining technique, to identify the research topics in the field of biochemistry over the past twenty years and quantitatively analyze the changes in its trends. The results of the topic modeling analysis obtained through this study will provide a helpful tool for researchers, journal editors, publishers, and funding agencies to understand the connections among the diverse sub-fields in biochemical research and even see how the research topics branch out and integrate with other fields.

In this study, we report that height-controlled vertically etched silicon nano-column arrays (vSNAs) induce strong growth cone-to-substrate coupling and accelerate In vitroneurite development while preserving the essential featuresof initial neurite formation. Large-scale preparation of vSNAs with flat head morphology enabled the generation of well-controlled topographical stimulation without cellular impalement. A systematic analysis on topography-induced variations on cellular morphology and cytoskeletal dynamics wasconducted. In addition, neurite development on the grid-patterned vSNAs exhibited preferential adhesion to the nanostructured region and outgrowthdirectionality. The arrangement of cytoskeletal proteins and the expression of afocal adhesion complex indicated that a strong coupling existedbetween the underlying nanocolumns and growth cones. Furthermore, the height-controlled nanocolumn substrates differentially modulated neurite polarization and elongation. Our findings provide an important insight into neuron-nanotopographyinteractions and their role in cell adhesion and neurite development.