| In spite of mass effort to understand glasses, basic features are still not completely known. Even whether or not glasses, as in windows, bottles, etc., are solids or liquids is not settled, let alone their thermodynamics.; To make some headway in understanding glasses, this dissertation will take two distinct approaches. First, a direct simulation of a glassy system will be performed and compared to experiments, and from this the thermodynamics will be found. Second, rather than looking directly at a specific system, a general energy landscape appropriate for glass will be considered, and a new numeric technique to exactly calculate thermodynamic quantities will be presented and applied.; The second part of this thesis will study diffusion on actin filament networks. Intracellular molecular motor-driven transport is essential for such diverse processes as mitosis, neuronal function, and mitochondrial transport. In vitro studies clarify these motors' function at the single molecule level but fail to elucidate how effective transport emerges from the collective behavior of multiple motors on a filamentary network. We investigate how the combined system of Myosin-V (MV) motors plus actin filaments is used to transport pigment granules in Xenopus melanophores. By analyzing single particle tracking data, we construct simulations and test a hypothesis that cells regulate transport by controlling how often granules switch from one filament to another, rather than, for example, altering motor activity at the single molecule level. |
