All issues

Despite the widespread use of cancer chemotherapy drugs, the molecular mechanisms of action of many of them remain unclear. Some of these drugs, such as taxol, are known to affect the dynamics of microtubule assembly and stop the process of cell division in prophase-prometaphase. Recently, new spatial structures of microtubules and individual tubulin oligomers have emerged associated with various regulatory proteins and cancer chemotherapy drugs. However, knowledge of the spatial structure in itself does not provide information about the mechanism of action of drugs.

In this work, we applied the molecular dynamics method to study the behavior of taxol-bound tubulin oligomers and used our previously developed method for analyzing the conformation of tubulin protofilaments, based on the calculation of modified Euler angles. Recent structures of microtubule fragments have demonstrated that tubulin protofilaments bend not in the radial direction, as many researchers assume, but at an angle of approximately 45◦ from the radial direction. However, in the presence of taxol, the bending direction shifts closer to the radial direction. There was no significant difference between the mean bending and torsion angles of the studied tubulin structures when bound to the various natural regulatory ligands, guanosine triphosphate and guanosine diphosphate. The intra-dimer bending angle was found to be greater than the interdimer bending angle in all analyzed trajectories. This indicates that the bulk of the deformation energy is stored within the dimeric tubulin subunits and not between them. Analysis of the structures of the latest generation of tubulins indicated that the presence of taxol in the tubulin beta subunit pocket allosterically reduces the torsional rigidity of the tubulin oligomer, which could explain the underlying mechanism of taxol’s effect on microtubule dynamics. Indeed, a decrease in torsional rigidity makes it possible to maintain lateral connections between protofilaments, and therefore should lead to the stabilization of microtubules, which is what is observed in experiments. The results of the work shed light on the phenomenon of dynamic instability of microtubules and allow to come closer to understanding the molecular mechanisms of cell division.

The paper presents the results of research on the creation of a mathematical model of moral choice based on the development of the approach proposed by V. A. Lefebvre. Unlike V. A. Lefebvre, who considered a very speculative situation of a subject’s moral choice between abstract “good” and “evil” under pressure from the outside world, taking into account the subjective perception of this pressure by the subject, our study considers a more mundane and practically significant situation. The case is considered when the subject, when making decisions, is guided by his individual perception of the outside world (which may be distorted, for example, due to external purposeful informational influence on the subject and manipulation of his consciousness), and “good” and “evil” are not abstract, but are conditioned by a value system adopted in a particular society under consideration and tied to a specific ideology/religion, which may be different for different societies.

As a result of the conducted research, a basic mathematical model has been developed, and special cases of its application have been considered. Some patterns related to moral choice are revealed, and their formal description is given. In particular, the situation of manipulation of consciousness is considered in the language of the model, the law of reducing the “morality” of a society consisting of so-called free subjects (that is, those who strive to act in accordance with their intentions and correspond in their actions to the image of their “I”) is formulated.

The author has analyzed main approaches to the mass appraisal of real property (Russian and foreign), pros and cons are pointed out. An approach based on spatial regression models which shows results better than conventional regression models and applicable to Russian real estate market is presented in the article.

Images of surface topography of ultrathin magnetic films have been used for Monte Carlo simulations in the framework of the ferromagnetic Ising model to study the hysteresis and thermal properties of nanomaterials. For high performance calculations was used super-scalable parallel algorithm for the finding of the equilibrium configuration. The changing of a distribution of spins on the surface during the reversal of the magnetization and the dynamics of nanodomain structure of thin magnetic films under the influence of changing external magnetic field was investigated.

Soil as a complex multifunctional open system is one of the most difficult object for modeling. In spite of serious achievements in the soil system modeling, existed models do not reflect all aspects and processes of soil organic matter mineralization and humification. The problems and “hot spots” in the modeling of the dynamics of soil organic matter and biophylous elements were identified on a base of creation and wide implementation of ROMUL and EFIMOD models. The following aspects are discussed: further theoretical background; improving the structure of models; preparation and uncertainty of the initial data; inclusion of all soil biota (microorganisms, micro- and meso-fauna) as factors of humification; impact of soil mineralogy on C and N dynamics; hydro-thermal regime and organic matter distribution in whole soil profile; vertical and horizontal migration of soil organic matter. An effective feedback from modellers to experimentalists is necessary to solve the listed problems.

This paper studies a model of a population with non-overlapping generations and density-dependent regulation of birth rate. The population breeds seasonally, and its reproductive potential is determined genetically. The model proposed combines an ecological dynamic model of a limited population with non-overlapping generations and microevolutionary model of its genetic structure dynamics for the case when adaptive trait of birth rate controlled by a single diallelic autosomal locus with allelomorphs A and a. The study showed the genetic composition of the population, namely, will it be polymorphic or monomorphic, is mainly determined by the values of the reproductive potentials of heterozygote and homozygotes. Moreover, the average reproductive potential of mature individuals and intensity of self-regulation processes determine population dynamics. In particularly, increasing the average value of the reproductive potential leads to destabilization of the dynamics of age group sizes. The intensity of self-regulation processes determines the nature of emerging oscillations, since scenario of stability loss of fixed points depends on the values of this parameter. It is shown that patterns of occurrence and evolution of cyclic dynamics regimes are mainly determined by the features of life cycle of individuals in population. The life cycle leading to existence of non-overlapping generation gives isolated subpopulations in different years, which results in the possibility of independent microevolution of these subpopulations and, as a result, the complex dynamics emergence of both stage structure and genetic one. Fixing various adaptive mutations will gradually lead to genetic (and possibly morphological) differentiation and to differences in the average reproductive potentials of subpopulations that give different values of equilibrium subpopulation sizes. Further evolutionary growth of reproductive potentials of limited subpopulations leads to their number fluctuations which can differ in both amplitude and phase.

The article examines the impact of non-market actions of participants in oligopolistic markets on the market structure. The following actions of one of the market participants aimed at increasing its market share are analyzed: 1) price manipulation; 2) blocking investments of stronger oligopolists; 3) destruction of produced products and capacities of competitors. Linear dynamic games with a quadratic criterion are used to model the strategies of oligopolists. The expediency of their use is due to the possibility of both an adequate description of the evolution of markets and the implementation of two mutually complementary approaches to determining the strategies of oligopolists: 1) based on the representation of models in the state space and the solution of generalized Riccati equations; 2) based on the application of operational calculus methods (in the frequency domain) which owns the visibility necessary for economic analysis.

The article shows the equivalence of approaches to solving the problem with maximin criteria of oligopolists in the state space and in the frequency domain. The results of calculations are considered in relation to a duopoly, with indicators close to one of the duopolies in the microelectronic industry of the world. The second duopolist is less effective from the standpoint of costs, though more mobile. Its goal is to increase its market share by implementing the non-market methods listed above.

Calculations carried out with help of the game model, made it possible to construct dependencies that characterize the relationship between the relative increase in production volumes over a 25-year period of weak and strong duopolists under price manipulation. Constructed dependencies show that an increase in the price for the accepted linear demand function leads to a very small increase in the production of a strong duopolist, but, simultaneously, to a significant increase in this indicator for a weak one.

Calculations carried out with use of the other variants of the model, show that blocking investments, as well as destroying the products of a strong duopolist, leads to more significant increase in the production of marketable products for a weak duopolist than to a decrease in this indicator for a strong one.

The grid-characteristic method is successfully used for solving hyperbolic systems of partial differential equations (for example, transport / acoustic / elastic equations). It allows to construct correctly algorithms on contact boundaries and boundaries of the integration domain, to a certain extent to take into account the physics of the problem (propagation of discontinuities along characteristic curves), and has the property of monotonicity, which is important for considered problems. In the cases of two-dimensional and three-dimensional problems the method makes use of a coordinate splitting technique, which enables us to solve the original equations by solving several one-dimensional ones consecutively. It is common to use up to 3-rd order one-dimensional schemes with simple splitting techniques which do not allow for the convergence order to be higher than two (with respect to time). Significant achievements in the operator splitting theory were done, the existence of higher-order schemes was proved. Its peculiarity is the need to perform a step in the opposite direction in time, which gives rise to difficulties, for example, for parabolic problems.

In this work coordinate splitting of the 3-rd and 4-th order were used for the two-dimensional hyperbolic problem of the linear elasticity. This made it possible to increase the final convergence order of the computational algorithm. The paper empirically estimates the convergence in L1 and L∞ norms using analytical solutions of the system with the sufficient degree of smoothness. To obtain objective results, we considered the cases of longitudinal and transverse plane waves propagating both along the diagonal of the computational cell and not along it. Numerical experiments demonstrated the improved accuracy and convergence order of constructed schemes. These improvements are achieved with the cost of three- or fourfold increase of the computational time (for the 3-rd and 4-th order respectively) and no additional memory requirements. The proposed improvement of the computational algorithm preserves the simplicity of its parallel implementation based on the spatial decomposition of the computational grid.

The method for mapping of intermediate representations (IR) set of C, C++ programs to vector embedding space is considered to create an empirical estimation framework for static performance prediction using LLVM compiler infrastructure. The usage of embeddings makes programs easier to compare due to avoiding Control Flow Graphs (CFG) and Data Flow Graphs (DFG) direct comparison. This method is based on transformation series of the initial IR such as: instrumentation — injection of artificial instructions in an instrumentation compiler’s pass depending on load offset delta in the current instruction compared to the previous one, mapping of instrumented IR into multidimensional vector with IR2Vec and dimension reduction with t-SNE (t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding) method. The D1 cache miss ratio measured with perf stat tool is considered as performance metric. A heuristic criterion of programs having more or less cache miss ratio is given. This criterion is based on embeddings of programs in 2D-space. The instrumentation compiler’s pass developed in this work is described: how it generates and injects artificial instructions into IR within the used memory model. The software pipeline that implements the performance estimation based on LLVM compiler infrastructure is given. Computational experiments are performed on synthetic tests which are the sets of programs with the same CFGs but with different sequences of offsets used when accessing the one-dimensional array of a given size. The correlation coefficient between performance metric and distance to the worst program’s embedding is measured and proved to be negative regardless of t-SNE initialization. This fact proves the heuristic criterion to be true. The process of such synthetic tests generation is also considered. Moreover, the variety of performance metric in programs set in such a test is proposed as a metric to be improved with exploration of more tests generators.

The work focuses on mathematical modeling of light influence mechanisms on macromolecular composition of microalgae batch culture. It is shown that even with a single limiting factor, the growth of microalgae is associated with a significant change in the biochemical composition of the biomass in any part of the batch curve. The well-known qualitative models of microalgae are based on concepts of enzymatic kinetics and do not take into account the possible change of the limiting factor during batch culture growth. Such models do not allow describing the dynamics of the relative content of biochemical components of cells. We proposed an alternative approach which is based on generally accepted two-stage photoautotrophic growth of microalgae. Microalgae biomass can be considered as the sum of two macromolecular components — structural and reserve. At the first stage, during photosynthesis a reserve part of biomass is formed, from which the biosynthesis of cell structures occurs at the second stage. Model also assumes the proportionality of all biomass structural components which greatly simplifies mathematical calculations and experimental data fitting. The proposed mathematical model is represented by a system of two differential equations describing the synthesis of reserve biomass compounds at the expense of light and biosynthesis of structural components from reserve ones. The model takes into account that a part of the reserve compounds is spent on replenishing the pool of macroergs. The rates of synthesis of structural and reserve forms of biomass are given by linear splines. Such approach allows us to mathematically describe the change in the limiting factor with an increase in the biomass of the enrichment culture of microalgae. It is shown that under light limitation conditions the batch curve must be divided into several areas: unlimited growth, low cell concentration and optically dense culture. The analytical solutions of the basic system of equations describing the dynamics of macromolecular biomass content made it possible to determine species-specific coefficients for various light conditions. The model was verified on the experimental data of biomass growth and dynamics of chlorophyll $a$ content of the red marine microalgae Pоrphуridium purpurеum batch culture.