Related papers: Loop-closure principles in protein folding
Many native structures of proteins accomodate complex topological motifs such as knots, lassos, and other geometrical entanglements. How proteins can fold quickly even in the presence of such topological obstacles is a debated question in…
The art of tying knots is exploited in nature and occurs in multiple applications ranging from being an essential part of scouting programs to engineering molecular knots. Biomolecular knots, such as knotted proteins, bear various cellular…
An all-atom model of proteins is used to show that the same sequence of amino acids can have many alternative structures, that are very distant from, and that can be as stable as, the corresponding native structure. Such alternative…
Focusing on a small set of proteins that i) fold in a concerted, all-or-none fashion and ii) do not contain knots or slipknots, we show that the Gauss linking integral, the torsion and the number of sequence-distant contacts provide…
Physical mechanisms underlying the empirical correlation between relative contact order (CO) and folding rate among naturally-occurring small single-domain proteins are investigated by evaluating postulated interaction schemes for a set of…
In structure-based models of proteins, one often assumes that folding is accomplished when all contacts are established. This assumption may frequently lead to a conceptual problem that folding takes place in a temperature region of very…
A geometric analysis of protein folding, which complements many of the models in the literature, is presented. We examine the process from unfolded strand to the point where the strand becomes self-interacting. A central question is how it…
Repeat proteins are made with tandem copies of similar amino acid stretches that fold into elongated architectures. Due to their symmetry, these proteins constitute excellent model systems to investigate how evolution relates to structure,…
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…
The dependence of the unfolding pathway of proteins on the pulling speed is investigated. This is done by introducing a simple one-dimensional chain comprising $N$ units, with different characteristic bistable free energies. These units…
Previous research has shown a strong correlation of protein folding rates to the native state geometry, yet a complete explanation for this dependence is still lacking. Here we study the rate-geometry relationship with a simple statistical…
Proteins form a very important class of polymers. In spite of major advances in the understanding of polymer science, the protein problem has remained largely unsolved. Here, we show that a polymer chain viewed as a tube not only captures…
Proteins fold using a two-state or multi-state kinetic mechanisms, but up to now there isn't a first-principle model to explain this different behaviour. We exploit the network properties of protein structures by introducing novel…
A simple lattice model, recently introduced as a generalization of the Wako--Sait\^o model of protein folding, is used to investigate the properties of widely studied molecules under external forces. The equilibrium properties of the model…
We study the folding process in the shallowly knotted protein MJ0366 within two variants of a structure-based model. We observe that the resulting topological pathways are much richer than identified in previous studies. In addition to the…
Single molecule manipulation techniques reveal that the mechanical resistance of a protein depends on the direction of the applied force. Using a lattice model of polymers, we show that changing the pulling direction leads to different…
Stretching of a protein by a fluid flow is compared to that in a force-clamp apparatus. The comparison is made within a simple topology-based dynamical model of a protein in which the effects of the flow are implemented using Langevin…
Thermal unfolding of proteins is compared to folding and mechanical stretching in a simple topology-based dynamical model. We define the unfolding time and demonstrate its low-temperature divergence. Below a characteristic temperature,…
Proteins, chain molecules of amino acids, behave in ways which are similar to each other yet quite distinct from standard compact polymers. We demonstrate that the Flory theorem, derived for polymer melts, holds for compact protein native…
The assumption that similar structures have similar folding probabilities ($p_{fold}$) leads naturally to a procedure to evaluate $p_{fold}$ for every snapshot saved along an equilibrium folding-unfolding trajectory of a structured peptide…