Related papers: Controlling the folding and substrate-binding of p…
Synthetic copolymers and biopolymers, such as polypeptides and double-stranded DNA, often exhibit strong variations in bending stiffness along their contour, which can significantly impact conformational behavior at larger scales. To…
The motion involved in barrier crossing for protein folding are investigated in terms of the chain dynamics of the polymer backbone, completing the microscopic description of protein folding presented in the previous paper. Local reaction…
In the cell, protein complexes form relying on specific interactions between their monomers. Excluded volume effects due to molecular crowding would lead to correlations between molecules even without specific interactions. What is the…
We present a statistical mechanics approach to the protein folding problem. We first review some of the basic properties of proteins, and introduce some physical models to describe their thermodynamics. These models rely on a random…
Effect of molecular crowding and confinement experienced by protein in the cell during unfolding has been studied by modeling a linear polymer chain on a percolation cluster. It is known that internal structure of the cell changes in time,…
The folding of a protein towards its native state is a rather complicated process. However there are empirical evidences that the folding time correlates with the contact order, a simple measure of the spatial organisation of the native…
In biology, there are several processes in which unfolded protein chains are transported along narrow-tube channels. Normally, without such a severe configurational constraint, unfolded polypeptides would not bind to each other. However,…
We investigate the folding behavior of protein sequences by numerically studying all sequences with maximally compact lattice model through exhaustive enumeration. We get the prion-like behavior of protein folding. Individual proteins…
Chromatin and associated proteins constitute the highly folded structure of chromosomes. We consider a self-avoiding polymer model of the chromatin, segments of which may get cross-linked via protein binders that repel each other. The…
Recent developments of microscopic mechanical experiments allow the manipulation of individual polymer molecules in two main ways: \textit{uniform} stretching by external forces and \textit{non-uniform} stretching by external fields. Many…
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…
Single domain proteins are thought to be tightly packed. The introduction of voids by mutations is often regarded as destabilizing. In this study we show that packing density for single domain proteins decreases with chain length. We find…
We use a three dimensional cubic lattice model of proteins to study their properties that determine folding to the native state. The protein chain is modeled as a sequence of $N$ beads. The interactions between beads are taken from a…
We explore the effect of an attractive interaction between parallel-aligned polymers, which are perpendicularly grafted on a substrate. Such an attractive interaction could be due to, e.g., reversible cross-links. The competition between…
Folding and aggregation of proteins, the interaction between proteins and membranes, as well as the adsorption of organic soft matter to inorganic solid substrates belong to the most interesting challenges in understanding structure and…
Making use of a simplified model for protein folding, it can be shown that conformations which are particularly stable when their energy is minimized with respect to amino acid sequence (in the sense that they display a large energy gap to…
We investigate the effect of mobile polymer brushes on proteins embedded in biological membranes by employing both Asakura-Oosawa type of theoretical model and coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations. The brush polymer-induced…
What can cells gain by using disordered, rather than folded, proteins in the architecture of their skeleton? Disordered proteins take multiple co-existing conformations, and often contain segments which act as random-walk-shaped polymers.…
While all the information required for the folding of a protein is contained in its amino acid sequence, one has not yet learnt how to extract this information so as to predict the detailed, biological active, three-dimensional structure of…
Proteins are minimally frustrated polymers. However, for realistic protein models non-native interactions must be taken into account. In this paper we analyze the effect of non-native interactions on the folding rate and on the folding free…