Related papers: Controlling the folding and substrate-binding of p…
In spite of decades of research, much remains to be discovered about folding: the detailed structure of the initial (unfolded) state, vestigial folding instructions remaining only in the unfolded state, the interaction of the molecule with…
The ability to control the crystallization behaviour (including its absence) of particles, be they biomolecules such as globular proteins, inorganic colloids, nanoparticles, or metal atoms in an alloy, is of both fundamental and…
Protein-mediated interactions are ubiquitous in the cellular environment, and particularly in the nucleus, where they are responsible for the structuring of chromatin. We show through molecular--dynamics simulations of a polymer surrounded…
Can active forces be exploited to drive the consistent collapse of an active polymer into a folded structure? In this paper we introduce and perform numerical simulations of a simple model of active colloidal folders, and show that a…
Protein sequences are believed to have been selected to provide the stability of, and reliable renaturation to, an encoded unique spatial fold. In recently proposed theoretical schemes, this selection is modeled as ``minimal frustration,''…
Protein folding, peptide aggregation and crystallization, as well as adsorption of molecules on soft or solid substrates have an essential feature in common: In all these processes, structure formation is guided by a collective, cooperative…
The relationship between interactions, flexibility and disorder in proteins has been explored from many angles: folding upon binding, flexibility of the core relative to the periphery, entropy changes, etc. In this work, we provide…
Monte Carlo simulations show that long-range interactions play a major role in determining the folding rates of 48-mer three-dimensional lattice polymers modelled by the Go potential. For three target structures with different native…
We revisit the classical problem of the behavior of an isolated linear polymer chain in confined spaces, introducing the distinction between two different confinement regimes (the {\it weak} and the {\it strong} confinement regimes,…
Packings of macroscopic granular chains capture some of the essential aspects of molecular polymer systems and have been suggested as a paradigm to understand the physics on a molecular scale. However, here we demonstrate that the…
In this paper, we introduce an approach to the protein folding problem from the point of view of statistical physics. Protein folding is a stochastic process by which a polypeptide folds into its characteristic and functional 3D structure…
Kinetics of folding of a protein held in a force-clamp are compared to an unconstrained folding. The comparison is made within a simple topology-based dynamical model of ubiquitin. We demonstrate that the experimentally observed variations…
It has recently been proposed that proteins embedded in lipidic bio-membranes can spontaneously self-organize into stable small clusters, or membrane nano-domains, due to the competition between short-range attractive and longer-range…
The folding of a polypeptide is an example of the cooperative effects of the amino-acid residues. Of recent interest is how a secondary structure, such as a helix, spontaneously forms during the collapse of a peptide from an initial…
A theory is presented for the binding of small molecules such as surfactants to semiflexible polymers. The persistence length is assumed to be large compared to the monomer size but much smaller than the total chain length. Such polymers…
Predicting the three-dimensional (3D) functional structures of proteins remains an important computational milestone in molecular biology to be achieved. This feat is hinged on a clear understanding of the mechanism which proteins use to…
Proteins are composed of chains of amino acids that fold into complex three-dimensional structures. Several key features, such as the radius of gyration, fraction of core amino acids $f_{\rm core}$, packing fraction $\langle \phi\rangle$ of…
The three-dimensional organisation of chromosomes can be probed using methods such as Capture-C. However it is unclear how such population level data relates to the organisation within a single cell, and the mechanisms leading to the…
We review theoretical approaches, experiments and numerical simulations that have been recently proposed to investigate the folding problem in single-domain proteins. From a theoretical point of view, we emphasize the energy landscape…
We report a simulation study for bottle-brush polymers grafted on a rigid backbone. Using a standard coarse-grained bead-spring model extensive molecular dynamics simulations for such macromolecules under good solvent conditions are…