Related papers: Sequence-specific size, structure, and stability o…
The necking instability is a precursor to tensile failure and rupture of materials. A quasistatically loaded free-standing uniaxial specimen typically exhibits necking at a single location, corresponding to a long wavelength bifurcation…
Molecular networks guide the biochemistry of a living cell on multiple levels: its metabolic and signalling pathways are shaped by the network of interacting proteins, whose production, in turn, is controlled by the genetic regulatory…
Lattice-model simulations and experiments of some small proteins suggest that folding is essentially controlled by a few conserved contacts. Residues of these conserved contacts form the minimum set of native contacts needed to ensure…
Many proteins interact with and deform double-stranded DNA in cells. Single-molecule experiments have studied the elasticity of DNA with helix-deforming proteins, including proteins that bend DNA. These experiments increase the need for…
The function of membrane-embedded proteins such as ion channels depends crucially on their conformation. We demonstrate how conformational changes in asymmetric membrane proteins may be inferred from measurements of their diffusion. Such…
The mechanical resistance of a polyethylene strand subject to tension and the way its properties are affected by the presence of a knot is studied using first-principles molecular dynamics calculations. The distribution of strain energy for…
Evolutionally conserved quantity that specifies folding nuclei is pursued by a case study for a small protein (PDB code: 1ten). First it is demonstrated that the sequences of amino acids at folding nuclei are not conserved. Then 3D…
We develop a theoretical description of the topological disentanglement occurring when torus knots reach the ends of a semi-flexible polymer under tension. These include decays into simpler knots and total unknotting. The minimal number of…
A new theoretical survey of proteins' resistance to constant speed stretching is performed for a set of 17 134 proteins as described by a structure-based model. The proteins selected have no gaps in their structure determination and consist…
The speed of site-specific binding of transcription factor (TFs) proteins with genomic DNA seems to be strongly retarded by the randomly occurring sequence traps. Traps are those DNA sequences sharing significant similarity with the…
We study the elastic response of a worm-like polymer chain with reversible kink-like structural defects. This is a generic model for (a) the double-stranded DNA with sharp bends induced by binding of certain proteins, and (b) effects of…
The statistical mechanics of a long knotted collapsed polymer is determined by a free-energy with a knot-dependent subleading term, which is linked to the length of the shortest polymer that can hold such knot. The only other parameter…
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…
The classical approach to protein folding inspired by statistical mechanics avoids the high dimensional structure of the conformation space by using effective coordinates. Here we introduce a network approach to capture the statistical…
For the vast majority of naturally occurring, small, single domain proteins folding is often described as a two-state process that lacks detectable intermediates. This observation has often been rationalized on the basis of a nucleation…
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…
The Kinetoplast DNA (kDNA) is a two-dimensional Olympic-ring-like network of mutually linked 2.5 kb-long DNA minicircles found in certain parasites called Trypanosomes. Understanding the self-assembly and replication of this structure are…
The evolutionary trajectory of a protein through sequence space is constrained by function and three-dimensional (3D) structure. Residues in spatial proximity tend to co-evolve, yet attempts to invert the evolutionary record to identify…
Mapping between sequence and structure is currently an open problem in structural biology. Despite many experimental and computational efforts it is not clear yet how the structure is encoded in the sequence. Answering this question may…
The folding pathway and rate coefficients of the folding of a knotted protein are calculated for a potential energy function with minimal energetic frustration. A kinetic transition network is constructed using the discrete path sampling…