Related papers: Physics of Caustics and Protein Folding: Mathemati…
Proteins are a matter of dual nature. As a physical object, a protein molecule is a folded chain of amino acids with multifarious biochemistry. But it is also an instantiation along an evolutionary trajectory determined by the function…
Understanding protein structure is of crucial importance in science, medicine and biotechnology. For about two decades, knowledge based potentials based on pairwise distances -- so-called "potentials of mean force" (PMFs) -- have been…
Understanding protein folding has been one of the great challenges in biochemistry and molecular biophysics. Over the past 50 years, many thermodynamic and kinetic studies have been performed addressing the stability of globular proteins.…
A kinetic model for the nucleation mechanism of protein folding is proposed. A protein is modeled as a heteropolymer consisting of hydrophobic and hydrophilic beads with equal constant bond lengths and bond angles. The total energy of the…
The interplay between structure-search of the native structure and desolvation in protein folding has been explored using a minimalist model. These results support a folding mechanism where most of the structural formation of the protein is…
Different models such as diffusion-collision and nucleation-condensation have been used to unravel how secondary and tertiary structures form during protein folding. However, a simple mechanism based on physical principles that provide an…
We investigate the rate-length scaling law of protein folding, a key undetermined scaling law in the analytical theory of protein folding. We demonstrate that chain length is a dominant factor determining folding times, and that the…
As protein folding is a NP-complete problem, artificial intelligence tools like neural networks and genetic algorithms are used to attempt to predict the 3D shape of an amino acids sequence. Underlying these attempts, it is supposed that…
Deviations from linearity in the dependence of the logarithm of protein unfolding rates, $\log k_u(f)$, as a function of mechanical force, $f$, measurable in single molecule experiments, can arise for many reasons. In particular, upward…
We study a system of hard-core particles sliding downwards on a fluctuating one-dimensional surface which is characterized by a dynamical exponent $z$. In numerical simulations, an initially random particle density is found to coarsen and…
Most of crystalline materials exhibit a hysteresis on their deformation curve when mechanically loaded in alternating directions. This Bauschinger effect is the signature of mechanisms existing at the atomic scale and controlling the…
The authors address the problem of downhill protein folding in the framework of a simple statistical mechanical model, which allows an exact solution for the equilibrium and a semianalytical treatment of the kinetics. Focusing on protein…
An elementary understanding of the relevant length, mass and energy scales at the molecular level can be used to explain the order of magnitude of material properties such as mass density, latent heat, surface tension, elastic moduli and…
We propose a general theory to describe the distribution of protein-folding transition paths. We show that transition paths follow a predictable sequence of high-free-energy transient states that are separated by free-energy barriers. Each…
The stochastic driving force exerted by a single molecular motor (e.g., a kinesin, or myosin) moving on a periodic molecular track (microtubule, actin filament, etc.) is discussed from a general viewpoint open to experimental test. An…
We recently introduced a physical model [Hoang et al., P. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA (2004), Banavar et al., Phys. Rev. E (2004)] for proteins which incorporates, in an approximate manner, several key features such as the inherent anisotropy of a…
The folding dynamics of proteins at the single molecule level has been studied with single-molecule force spectroscopy (SMFS) experiments for twenty years, but a common standardized method for the analysis of the collected data and for the…
The high computational cost of carrying out molecular dynamics simulations of even small-size proteins is a major obstacle in the study, at atomic detail and in explicit solvent, of the physical mechanism which is at the basis of the…
The number of protein structures is far less than the number of sequences. By imposing simple generic features of proteins (low energy and compaction) on all possible sequences we show that the structure space is sparse compared to the…
The thermodynamic behavior of a three-dimensional off-lattice model for protein folding is probed. The model has only two types of residues, hydrophobic and hydrophilic. In absence of local interactions, native structure formation does not…