Related papers: Force-dependent switch in protein unfolding pathwa…
Intracellular transport is an essential function in eucaryotic cells, facilitated by motor proteins - proteins converting chemical energy into kinetic energy. It is known that motor proteins work in teams enabling unidirectional and…
We discuss the use of a structure based C$\alpha$-Go model and Langevin dynamics to study in detail the mechanical properties and unfolding pathway of the titin I27 domain. We show that a simple Go-model does detect correctly the origin of…
We study the dynamics of protein folding via statistical energy-landscape theory. In particular, we concentrate on the local-connectivity case with the folding progress described by the fraction of native conformations. We obtain…
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,…
We theoretically investigate the kinetics of the folding transition of a single semiflexible polymer. In the folding transition, the growth rate decrease with an increase in the number of monomers in a collapsed domain, suggesting that the…
We have studied the mobility of the folding catalyst, protein disulphide-isomerase (PDI), by molecular dynamics and by a rapid approach based on flexibility. We analysed our simulations using measures of backbone movement, relative…
Developing accurate and efficient coarse-grained representations of proteins is crucial for understanding their folding, function, and interactions over extended timescales. Our methodology involves simulating proteins with molecular…
The accurate knowledge of the elastic properties of single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) is key to characterize the thermodynamics of molecular reactions that are studied by force spectroscopy methods where DNA is mechanically unfolded. Examples…
Various biological sensory systems exhibit a response to a relative change of the stimulus, often referred to as fold-change detection. In the last few years fold-change detecting mechanisms, based on transcriptional networks, have been…
The conformational dynamics of a single protein molecule in a shear flow is investigated using Brownian dynamics simulations. A structure-based coarse grained model of a protein is used. We consider two proteins, ubiquitin and integrin, and…
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…
We propose a universal elastic energy for proteins, which depends only on the radius of gyration $R_{g}$ and the residue number $N$. It is constructed using physical arguments based on the hydrophobic effect and hydrogen bonding. Adjustable…
We investigate the sequence-dependent properties of proteins that determine the dual requirements of stability of the native state and its kinetic accessibility using simple cubic lattice models. Three interaction schemes are used to…
Force extension curves (FECs), which quantify the response of a variety of biomolecules subject to mechanical force ($f$), are often quantitatively fit using worm-like chain (WLC) or freely-jointed chain (FJC) models. These models predict…
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…
The refolding from stretched initial conformations of ubiquitin (PDB ID: 1ubq) under the quenched force is studied using the Go model and the Langevin dynamics. It is shown that the refolding decouples the collapse and folding kinetics. The…
Single molecule force spectroscopy methods can be used to generate folding trajectories of biopolymers from arbitrary regions of the folding landscape. We illustrate the complexity of the folding kinetics and generic aspects of the collapse…
General energy approaches have been applied to study the single-domain polarization reversal induced by the voltage-modulated Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) in ferroelectric single crystals and thin films. Topographic analysis of energy…
Single-molecule stretching experiments on DNA, RNA, and other biological macromolecules opened up the possibility of an impressive progress in many fields of Life and Medical sciences. The reliability of such experiments may be crucially…
Small single-domain proteins often exhibit only a single free-energy barrier, or transition state, between the denatured and the native state. The folding kinetics of these proteins is usually explored via mutational analysis. A central…