English

Glassy dynamics and memory effects in an intrinsically disordered protein construct

Soft Condensed Matter 2020-07-30 v1 Biological Physics

Abstract

Glassy, nonexponential relaxations in globular proteins are typically attributed to conformational behaviors that are missing from intrinsically disordered proteins. Yet, we show that single molecules of a disordered-protein construct display two signatures of glassy dynamics, logarithmic relaxations and a Kovacs memory effect, in response to changes in applied tension. We attribute this to the presence of multiple independent local structures in the chain, which we corroborate with a model that correctly predicts the force dependence of the relaxation. The mechanism established here likely applies to other disordered proteins.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2007.10404,
  title  = {Glassy dynamics and memory effects in an intrinsically disordered protein construct},
  author = {Ian L. Morgan and Ram Avinery and Gil Rahamim and Roy Beck and Omar A. Saleh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.10404},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

6 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters

R2 v1 2026-06-23T17:15:40.668Z