Related papers: Lymphotactin: how a protein can adopt two folds
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 phenomenological model hamiltonian to describe the folding of a protein with any given sequence is proposed. The protein is thought of as a collection of pieces of helices; as a consequence its configuration space increases with the…
It is crucial to measure position and conformational changes of a membrane-interacting protein relative to the membrane surface. This is however challenging because the thickness of a membrane is usually only about 4 nm. We developed a…
The thermodynamics of proteins indicate that folding/unfolding takes place either through stable intermediates or through a two-state process without intermediates. The rather short folding times of the two-state process indicate that…
Though the problem of sequence-reversed protein folding is largely unexplored, one might speculate that reversed native protein sequences should be significantly more foldable than purely random heteropolymer sequences. In this article, we…
Proteins, by virtue of their central role in most biological processes, represent one of the key subjects of the study of molecular evolution. Inherent to the indispensability of proteins for living cells is the fact that a given protein…
We consider two types of Go models of a protein (crambin) and study their kinetics through molecular dynamics simulations. In the first model, the residue -- residue contact interactions are selected based on a cutoff distance, $R_c$,…
We present a method to investigate the kinetics of protein folding on a long time-scale and the dynamics underlying the formation of secondary and tertiary structures during the entire reaction. The approach is based on the formal analogy…
The enterobacteria lambda phage is a paradigm temperate bacteriophage. Its lysogenic and lytic life cycles echo competition between the DNA binding $\lambda$-repressor (CI) and CRO proteins. Here we scrutinize the structure, stability and…
We discuss recent theoretical developments in the study of simple lattice models of proteins. Such models are designed to understand general features of protein structures and mechanism of folding. Among the topics covered are (i) the use…
Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) can fold into shapes that perform functions in the cell. These foldings are governed by Watson-Crick base pairing, namely Adenine to Uracil and Cytosine to Guanine (A-U and G-C). The properties of the H-P…
In the protein sequence space, natural proteins form clusters of families which are characterized by their unique native folds whereas the great majority of random polypeptides are neither clustered nor foldable to unique structures. Since…
We investigate theoretically the behavior of proteins as well as other large macromolecules which are incorporated into amphiphilic monolayers at the air-water interface. We assume the monolayer to be in the coexistence region of the…
We have studied folding mechanisms of three small globular proteins: crambin (CRN), chymotrypsin inhibitor 2 (CI2) and the fyn Src Homology 3 domain (SH3) which are modelled by a Go-like Hamiltonian with the Lennard-Jones interactions. It…
We propose a protein model based on a hierarchy of constraints that force the protein to follow certain pathways when changing conformation. The model exhibits a first order phase transition, cooperativity and is exactly solvable. It also…
Proteins are an important class of biomolecules that serve as essential building blocks of the cells. Their three-dimensional structures are responsible for their functions. In this thesis we have investigated the protein structures using a…
In this letter, the possible dynamic scaling properties of protein molecules in folding are investigated theoretically by assuming that the protein molecules are percolated networks. It is shown that the fractal character and the fractal…
Natural proteins fold to a unique, thermodynamically dominant state. Modeling of the folding process and prediction of the native fold of proteins are two major unsolved problems in biophysics. Here, we show successful all-atom ab initio…
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,…
We study the mechanical unfolding of a simple model protein. The Langevin dynamics results are analyzed using Markov-model methods which allow to describe completely the configurational space of the system. Using transition path theory we…