Related papers: Extracting folding landscape characteristics of bi…
Biological macromolecules have complex and non-trivial energy landscapes, endowing them a unique conformational adaptability and diversity in function. Hence, understanding the processes of elasticity and dissipation at the nanoscale is…
The glassy dynamics of soft harmonic spheres is often mapped onto the dynamics of hard spheres by considering an effective diameter for the soft particles and therefore an effective packing fraction. While in this approach the thermal…
We present a molecular dynamics based method for computing accurately short-range structural forces resulting from the overlap of spatially diffuse solid-liquid interfaces at wetted grain boundaries close to the melting point. The method is…
We review the background, theory and general equations for the analysis of equilibrium protein unfolding experiments, focusing on denaturant and heat-induced unfolding. The primary focus is on the thermodynamics of reversible…
Electron energy loss spectroscopy is consolidating as a powerful tool to explore electronic (as well as vibrational) excitations of matter, including molecules. Performed in a scanning transmission electron microscope, this technique is…
At equilibrium, thermodynamic and kinetic information can be extracted from biomolecular energy landscapes by many techniques. However, while static, ensemble techniques yield thermodynamic data, often only dynamic, single-molecule…
DNA hairpin molecules with periodic base sequences can be expected to exhibit a regular coarse-grained free energy landscape (FEL) as function of the number of open base pairs and applied mechanical force. Using a commonly employed model,…
We extend to finite temperature a Green's function method that was previously proposed to evaluate ground-state properties of mesoscopic clouds of non-interacting fermions moving under harmonic confinement in one dimension. By calculations…
The use of beta-solenoid proteins as functionalizable, nanoscale, self-assembling molecular building blocks may have many applications, including templating the growth of wires or higher-dimensional structures. By understanding their…
We consider a stiff polymer chain in poor solvent and apply a force at one end of the chain. We find that by varying the stiffness parameter, polymer undergoes a transition from the globule state to the folded like state. The conformation…
We propose a simple approach, based on the minimization of the total (entropic plus unfolding) energy of a two-state system, describing the stretch-induced unfolding of macromolecules (proteins, silks, nanopolymers, DNA/RNA). The model is…
While ubiquitous, energy redistribution remains a poorly understood facet of the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of biomolecules. At the molecular level, finite-size effects, pronounced nonlinearities, and ballistic processes produce behavior…
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…
For several decades, experimental and computational studies have been used to investigate the potential functional role of knots in protein structures. A property that has attracted considerable attention is thermal stability, i.e., the…
We analyze the thermodynamic properties of a simplified model for folded RNA molecules recently studied by G. Vernizzi, H. Orland, A. Zee (in {\it Phys. Rev. Lett.} {\bf 94} (2005) 168103). The model consists of a chain of one-flavor base…
Experimental studies on enzyme evolution show that only a small fraction of all possible mutation trajectories are accessible to evolution. However, these experiments deal with individual enzymes and explore a tiny part of the fitness…
Non-coding RNA sequences play a great role in controlling a number of cellular functions, thus raising the need to understand their complex conformational dynamics in quantitative detail. In this perspective, we first show that single…
We show how to localize and quantify the functional evolutionary constraints on natural proteins. The method compares the perturbations caused by local sequence variants to the energetics of the protein folding process and to the…
A method for reconstructing the energy landscape of simple polypeptidic chains is described. We show that we can construct an equivalent representation of the energy landscape by a suitable directed graph. Its topological and dynamical…
Protein folding processes are generally described statistically with the help of multidimensional free energy landscape, typically reduced to a 1-D free energy profile along good reaction co-ordinate. There are many physical parameters…