Biomolecules
Identifying protein functional sites (PFSs) and protein-ligand interactions (PLIs) are critically important in understanding the protein function and the involved biochemical reactions. As large amount of unknown proteins are quickly…
As a consequence of the rugged landscape of RNA molecules their folding is described by the kinetic partitioning mechanism according to which only a small fraction ($\phi_F$) reaches the folded state while the remaining fraction of…
S-adenosylhomocysteine hydrolase (SAHH), a cellular enzyme that plays a key role in methylation reactions including those required for maturation of viral mRNA, is an important drug target in the discovery of antiviral agents. While…
Urea titration of RNA by urea is an effective approach to investigate the forces stabilizing this biologically important molecule. We used all atom molecular dynamics simulations using two urea force fields and two RNA constructs to…
Using a structure-based coarse-grained model of proteins, we study the mechanism of unfolding of knotted proteins through heating. We find that the dominant mechanisms of unfolding depend on the temperature applied and are generally…
Modern biomedicine is challenged to predict the effects of genetic variation. Systematic functional assays of point mutants of proteins have provided valuable empirical information, but vast regions of sequence space remain unexplored.…
Recently exciting progress has been made on protein contact prediction, but the predicted contacts for proteins without many sequence homologs is still of low quality and not very useful for de novo structure prediction. This paper presents…
Circular polarization spectroscopy has proven to be an indispensable tool in photosynthesis research and (bio)-molecular research in general. Oxygenic photosystems typically display an asymmetric Cotton effect around the chlorophyll…
Water molecules inside G-protein coupled receptor have recently been spotlighted in a series of crystal structures. To decipher the dynamics and functional roles of internal waters in GPCR activity, we studied A$_{\text{2A}}$ adenosine…
The Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson paradigm is applied to model the low-temperature crystallographic C$\alpha$ backbone structure of sperm whale myoglobin. The Glauber protocol is employed to simulate its response to an increase in ambient…
In this work, we report the heat rectifying capability of a-helices. Using molecular dynamics simulations we show an increased thermal diffusivity in the C-Terminal to N-Terminal direction of propagation. The origin of this effect seems to…
Protein-peptide molecular docking is a difficult modeling problem. It is even more challenging when significant conformational changes that may occur during the binding process need to be predicted. In this chapter, we demonstrate the…
In this paper, we introduce multiscale persistent functions for biomolecular structure characterization. The essential idea is to combine our multiscale rigidity functions with persistent homology analysis, so as to construct a series of…
Dynamics and functions of G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) are accurately regulated by the type of ligands that bind to the orthosteric or allosteric binding sites. To glean the structural and dynamical origin of ligand-dependent…
We develop a quantum scattering model to describe the exciton transport through the Fenna-Matthews-Olson(FMO) complex. It is found that the exciton transport involved the optimal quantum coherence is more efficient than that involved…
N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors (NMDARs) are glycoproteins in the brain central to learning and memory. The effects of glycosylation on the structure and dynamics of NMDARs are largely unknown. In this work, we use extensive molecular…
This paper applies the Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) statistical ensemble technique to estimate small molecule solvation free energies. There is a wide range of methods available for predicting solvation free energies, ranging from…
Predicting the 3D structure of a macromolecule, such as a protein or an RNA molecule, is ranked top among the most difficult and attractive problems in bioinformatics and computational biology. Its importance comes from the relationship…
Geometric, topological and graph theory modeling and analysis of biomolecules are of essential importance in the conceptualization of molecular structure, function, dynamics, and transport. On the one hand, geometric modeling provides…
Single molecule detection, sequencing and conformational mapping of aptamers are important for improving medical and biosensing technologies and for better understanding of biological processes at the molecular level. We obtain vibrational…