Related papers: Physics of Caustics and Protein Folding: Mathemati…
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 a recent Letter, Gutin, Abkevich, and Shakhnovich (GAS) reported on a series of dynamical Monte Carlo simulations on lattice models of proteins. Based on these highly simplified models, they found that four different potential energies…
We use a free energy functional theory to elucidate general properties of heterogeneously ordering, fast folding proteins, and we test our conclusions with lattice simulations. We find that both structural and energetic heterogeneity can…
According to the 'old view', proteins fold along well-defined sequential pathways, whereas the 'new view' sees protein folding as a highly parallel stochastic process on funnel-shaped energy landscapes. We have analyzed parallel and…
How proteins fold remains a central unsolved problem in biology. While the idea of a folding code embedded in the amino acid sequence was introduced more than 6 decades ago, this code remains undefined. While we now have powerful predictive…
The dynamics of a tagged particle immersed in a fluid of particles of the same size but different mass is studied when the system is confined between two hard parallel plates separated a distance smaller than twice the diameter of the…
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…
Models of protein energetics which neglect interactions between amino acids that are not adjacent in the native state, such as the Go model, encode or underlie many influential ideas on protein folding. Implicit in this simplification is a…
The protein folding is regarded as a quantum transition between torsion states on polypeptide chain. The deduction of the folding rate formula in our previous studies is reviewed. The rate formula is generalized to the case of frequency…
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…
The dynamics of folding of proteins is studied by means of a phenomenological master equation. The energy distribution is taken as a truncated exponential for the misfolded states plus a native state sitting below the continuum. The…
Molecular dynamics simulations of folding in an off-lattice protein model reveal a nucleation scenario, in which a few well-defined contacts are formed with high probability in the transition state ensemble of conformations. Their…
Simple two-state folding kinetics of many small single-domain proteins are characterized by chevron plots with linear folding and unfolding arms consistent with a two-state description of equilibrium thermodynamics. This phenomenon is…
We model protein folding as a physical stochastic process as follows. The unfolded protein chain is treated as a random coil described by SAW (self-avoiding walk). Folding is induced by hydrophobic forces and other interactions, such as…
Proteins created by combinatorial methods in vitro are an important source of information for understanding sequence-structure-function relationships. Alignments of folded proteins from combinatorial libraries can be analyzed using methods…
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…
The dynamics of small, yet heavy, identical particles in turbulence exhibits singularities, called caustics, that lead to large fluctuations in the spatial particle-number density, and in collision velocities. For large particle, inertia…
We study the geometric properties of the energy landscape of coarse-grained, off-lattice models of polymers by endowing the configuration space with a suitable metric, depending on the potential energy function, such that the dynamical…
A comparative classification scheme provides a good basis for several approaches to understand proteins, including prediction of relations between their structure and biological function. But it remains a challenge to combine a…
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…