Related papers: Neutral genetic drift can aid functional protein e…
Biological networks have evolved to be highly functional within uncertain environments while remaining extremely adaptable. One of the main contributors to the robustness and evolvability of biological networks is believed to be their…
The emergence of biochemical activities in a protein seem to commence with the onset of atomic mean-square displacements along the protein lattice. The ensuing protein dynamical transition has been discussed extensively in the literature,…
Evolution of genetic code is studied as the change in the choice of enzymes that are used to synthesize amino acids from the genetic information of nucleic acids. We propose the following theory: the differentiation of physiological states…
We discovered a dynamic phase transition induced by sexual reproduction. The dynamics is a pure Darwinian rule with both fundamental ingredients to drive evolution: 1) random mutations and crossings which act in the sense of increasing the…
Post-transductional modifications tune the functions of proteins and regulate the collective dynamics of biochemical networks that determine how cells respond to environmental signals. For example, protein phosphorylation and nitrosylation…
Enzyme engineering enables the modification of wild-type proteins to meet industrial and research demands by enhancing catalytic activity, stability, binding affinities, and other properties. The emergence of deep learning methods for…
It is shown that a small subset of modes which are likely to be involved in protein functional motions of large amplitude can be determined by retaining the most robust normal modes obtained using different protein models. This result…
Epistasis describes the phenomenon that mutations at different loci do not have independent effects with regard to certain phenotypes. Understanding the global epistatic landscape is vital for many genetic and evolutionary theories. Current…
Protein mutations can have profound effects on biological function, making accurate prediction of property changes critical for drug discovery, protein engineering, and precision medicine. Current approaches rely on fine-tuning…
The relationship between sequences and secondary structures or shapes in RNA exhibits robust statistical properties summarized by three notions: (1) the notion of a typical shape (that among all sequences of fixed length certain shapes are…
The majority of the proteins encoded in the genomes of eukaryotes contain more than one domain. Reasons for high prevalence of multi-domain proteins in various organisms have been attributed to higher stability and functional and folding…
The aim of this work is to elucidate how physical principles of protein design are reflected in natural sequences that evolved in response to the thermal conditions of the environment. Using an exactly solvable lattice model, we design…
The mutation-selection mechanism of Darwinian evolution gives rise not only to adaptation to environmental conditions but also to the enhancement of robustness against mutations. When two or more phenotypes have the same fitness value, the…
Mitochondrial function relies on the coordinated expression of mitochondrial and nuclear genes, exhibiting remarkable resilience regardless the susceptibility of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) to accumulate harmful mutations. A suggested…
Atomic displacements of hydrated proteins are dominated by phonon vibrations at low temperatures and by dissipative large-amplitude motions at high temperatures. A crossover between the two regimes is known as a dynamical transition. Recent…
We describe the evolution of macromolecules as an information transmission process and apply tools from Shannon information theory to it. This allows us to isolate three independent, competing selective pressures that we term compression,…
The macromolecules that encode and translate information in living systems, DNA and RNA, exhibit distinctive structural asymmetries, including homochirality or mirror image asymmetry and $3' - 5'$ directionality, that are invariant across…
Darwin's theory of evolution emphasized that positive selection of functional proficiency provides the fitness that ultimately determines the structure of life, a view that has dominated biochemical thinking of enzymes as perfectly…
Stabilizing proteins is a foundational step in protein engineering. However, the evolutionary pressure of all extant proteins makes identifying the scarce number of mutations that will improve thermodynamic stability challenging. Deep…
We study the target searching on the DNA for proteins in the presence of non-constant drift and non-Gaussian $\alpha$-stable L\'evy fluctuations. The target searching is realized by the facilitated diffusion process. The existing works are…