Related papers: Asymptotics of Stochastic Protein Assembly Models
Dimerization and subsequent aggregation of polymers and biopolymers often occur under nonequilibrium conditions. When the initial state of the polymer is not collapsed or the final folded native state, the dynamics of dimerization can…
How proteins fold remains a central unsolved problem in biology. While the idea of a folding code embedded in the amino acid sequence was introduced more than 6 decades ago, this code remains undefined. While we now have powerful predictive…
We carry out a theoretical study of the vibrational and relaxation properties of naturally-occurring proteins with the purpose of characterizing both the folding and equilibrium thermodynamics. By means of a suitable model we provide a full…
The frog model starts with one active particle at the root of a graph and some number of dormant particles at all nonroot vertices. Active particles follow independent random paths, waking all inactive particles they encounter. We prove…
Semiflexible polymers in concentrated lyotropic solution are studied within a bead-spring model by molecular dynamics simulations, focusing on the emergence of a smectic A phase and its properties. We systematically vary the density of the…
Many unicellular organisms allocate their key proteins asymmetrically between the mother and daughter cells, especially in a stressed environment. A recent theoretical model is able to predict when the asymmetry in segregation of key…
We estimate the probability regarding polymerization of a macromolecule which is made of distinct monomers. The lattice model of the random walk has been used to mimic the conformations of an ideal chain in two and three dimensions. It has…
Asymmetric segregation of key proteins at cell division -- be it a beneficial or deleterious protein -- is ubiquitous in unicellular organisms and often considered as an evolved trait to increase fitness in a stressed environment. Here, we…
A collection of thin structures buckle, bend, and bump into each-other when confined. This contact can lead to the formation of patterns: hair will self-organize in curls; DNA strands will layer into cell nuclei; paper, when crumpled, will…
Mass spectrometry provides a high-throughput way to identify proteins in biological samples. In a typical experiment, proteins in a sample are first broken into their constituent peptides. The resulting mixture of peptides is then subjected…
The prediction of the three-dimensional native structure of proteins from the knowledge of their amino acid sequence, known as the protein folding problem, is one of the most important yet unsolved issues of modern science. Since the…
Coagulation-fragmentation processes describe the stochastic association and dissociation of particles in clusters. Cluster dynamics with cluster-cluster interactions for a finite number of particles has recently attracted attention…
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…
We propose a simple phenomenological model for describing the conformational dynamics of biopolymers via the nonlinearity-induced buckling and collapse (i.e. coiling up) instabilities. Taking into account the coupling between the internal…
Telomeres are repetitive sequences of nucleotides at the end of chromosomes, whose evolution over time is intrinsically related to biological ageing. In most cells, with each cell division, telomeres shorten due to the so-called end…
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…
A theoretical analysis of the unfolding pathway of simple modular proteins in length- controlled pulling experiments is put forward. Within this framework, we predict the first module to unfold in a chain of identical units, emphasizing the…
Protein aggregation is an important field of investigation because it is closely related to the problem of neurodegenerative diseases, to the development of biomaterials, and to the growth of cellular structures such as cyto-skeleton.…
Preliminary results are presented for the kinetics of phase separation in three distinct models of protein aggregation. The first is a model of the formation of spherical microcrystals of insulin via an initial formation of fractal clusters…
We propose an exactly solvable simplified statistical mechanical model for the thermodynamics of beta-amyloid aggregation, generalizing a well-studied model for protein folding. The monomer concentration is explicitly taken into account as…