Related papers: Folding and Stabilization of Native-Sequence-Rever…
One of the most puzzling and unsolved challenges in molecular biology is understanding how proteins fold. Despite having advanced predictive tools that can accurately estimate the native structures of proteins, we still lack a comprehensive…
Novel numerical techniques, validated by an analysis of barnase and chymotrypsin inhibitor, are used to elucidate the paramount role played by the geometry of the protein backbone in steering the folding to the correct native state. It is…
These lectures will address two questions. Is there a simple variational principle underlying the existence of secondary motifs in the native state of proteins? Is there a general approach which can qualitatively capture the salient…
A general theoretical framework is developed using free energy functional methods to understand the effects of heterogeneity in the folding of a well-designed protein. Native energetic heterogeneity arising from non-uniformity in native…
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 statistical mechanics of heteropolymer structure formation is studied in the context of RNA secondary structures. A designed RNA sequence biased energetically towards a particular native structure (a hairpin) is used to study the…
Natural protein sequences that self-assemble to form globular structures are compact with high packing densities in the folded states. It is known that proteins unfold upon addition of denaturants, adopting random coil structures. The…
The determination of the folding mechanisms of proteins is critical to understand the topological change that can propagate Alzheimer and Creutzfeld-Jakobs diseases, among others. The computational community has paid considerable attention…
Natural proteins fold to a unique, thermodynamically dominant state. Modeling of the folding process and prediction of the native fold of proteins are two major unsolved problems in biophysics. Here, we show successful all-atom ab initio…
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…
Accurately assigning folds for divergent protein sequences is a major obstacle to structural studies and underlies the inverse protein folding problem. Herein, we outline our theories for fold-recognition in the "twilight-zone" of sequence…
In the course of evolution, proteins undergo important changes in their amino acid sequences, while their three-dimensional folded structure and their biological function remain remarkably conserved. Thanks to modern sequencing techniques,…
Exploring the protein-folding problem has been a long-standing challenge in molecular biology. Protein folding is highly dependent on folding of secondary structures as the way to pave a native folding pathway. Here, we demonstrate that a…
Mapping between sequence and structure is currently an open problem in structural biology. Despite many experimental and computational efforts it is not clear yet how the structure is encoded in the sequence. Answering this question may…
Deep neural networks such as AlphaFold and RoseTTAFold predict remarkably accurate structures of proteins compared to other algorithmic approaches. It is known that biologically small perturbations in the protein sequence do not lead to…
Protein structures are a very special class among all possible structures. It was suggested that a ``designability principle'' plays a crucial role in nature's selection of protein sequences and structures. Here we provide a theoretical…
We test a simplified, local version of the helix model on two synthetic and two natural proteins, to study its efficiency in predicting the native secondary structure. The results we obtain are very good for the synthetic sequences, poorer…
In this study we evaluate, at full atomic detail, the folding processes of two small helical proteins, the B domain of protein A and the Villin headpiece. Folding kinetics are studied by performing a large number of ab initio Monte Carlo…
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 is the intricate process by which a linear sequence of amino acids self-assembles into a unique three-dimensional structure. Protein folding kinetics is the study of pathways and time-dependent mechanisms a protein undergoes…