Hydrogen Bonds in Polymer Folding
Condensed Matter
2009-10-31 v1 q-bio
Abstract
The thermodynamics of a homopolymeric chain with both Van der Waals and highly-directional hydrogen bond interaction is studied. The effect of hydrogen bonds is to reduce dramatically the entropy of low-lying states and to give raise to long-range order and to conformations displaying secondary structures. For compact polymers a transition is found between helix-rich states and low-entropy sheet-dominated states. The consequences of this transition for protein folding and, in particular, for the problem of prions are discussed.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0003307,
title = {Hydrogen Bonds in Polymer Folding},
author = {J. Borg and M. H. Jensen and K. Sneppen and G. Tiana},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0003307},
year = {2009}
}