Related papers: Intricate Knots in Proteins: Function and Evolutio…
In the course of evolution, proteins undergo important changes in their amino acid sequences, while their three-dimensional folded structure and their biological function remain remarkably conserved. Thanks to modern sequencing techniques,…
Recent progress has been made in the understanding of the physical properties of chromatin -- the dense complex of DNA and histone proteins that occupies the nuclei of plant and animal cells. Here I will focus on the two lowest levels of…
The human proteome is enriched in proteins that do not fold into a stable 3D structure. These intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) spontaneously fluctuate between a large number of configurations in their native form. Remarkably, the…
Protein structures are a very special class among all possible structures. It was suggested that a ``designability principle'' plays a crucial role in nature's selection of protein sequences and structures. Here we provide a theoretical…
Protein function is driven by cohesive substructures, such as catalytic triads, binding pockets, and structural motifs, that occupy only a small fraction of a protein's residues. Yet existing pipelines built on protein encoders do not model…
A framework is presented for understanding the common character of proteins. Proteins are linear chain molecules. However, the simple model of a polymer viewed as spheres tethered together does not account for many of the observed…
AlphaFold, a groundbreaking protein prediction model, has revolutionized protein structure prediction, populating the AlphaFold Protein Database (AFDB) with millions of predicted structures. However, AlphaFold's accuracy in predicting…
Despite the variety of protein sizes, shapes, and backbone configurations found in nature, the design of novel protein folds remains an open problem. Within simple lattice models it has been shown that all structures are not equally…
Kinetics of folding of a protein held in a force-clamp are compared to an unconstrained folding. The comparison is made within a simple topology-based dynamical model of ubiquitin. We demonstrate that the experimentally observed variations…
Protein MJ0366 is a hypothetical protein from Methanocaldococcus jannaschii that has a rare and complex knot in its structure. The knot is a right-handed trefoil knot that involves about half of the protein's residues. In this article, we…
Semiflexible polymer models are widely used as a paradigm to understand structural phases in biomolecules including folding of proteins. Since stable knots are not so common in real proteins, the existence of stable knots in semiflexible…
The ability to computationally generate novel yet physically foldable protein structures could lead to new biological discoveries and new treatments targeting yet incurable diseases. Despite recent advances in protein structure prediction,…
In this work, we discovered a fundamental connection between selection for protein stability and emergence of preferred structures of proteins. Using standard exact 3-dimensional lattice model we evolve sequences starting from random ones…
We consider how beads can diffuse along a chain that wraps them, without becoming displaced from the chain; our proposed mechanism is analogous to the reptation of "stored length" in more familiar situations of polymer dynamics. The problem…
Protein-protein binding enables orderly and lawful biological self-organization, and is therefore considered a miracle of nature. Protein-protein binding is steered by electrostatic forces, hydrogen bonding, van der Waals force, and…
Novel numerical techniques, validated by an analysis of barnase and chymotrypsin inhibitor, are used to elucidate the paramount role played by the geometry of the protein backbone in steering the folding to the correct native state. It is…
The chromatin fiber is a complex of DNA and specific proteins called histones forming the first structural level of organization of eukaryotic chromosomes. In tightly organized chromatin fibers, the short segments of naked DNA linking the…
The growing interest for comparing protein internal dynamics owes much to the realization that protein function can be accompanied or assisted by structural fluctuations and conformational changes. Analogously to the case of functional…
We present a systematic classification of uncolored bonded knots with singularity number at most seven. Bonded knots provide a topological model for closed protein chains with intramolecular bridges, such as disulfide bonds. Following the…
It is well-known that intrinsically disordered proteins (IDP) are highly dynamic, which is related to their functionality in various biological processes. However, the characterization of the intricate structures of IDP has been a…