Related papers: Protein Collapse is Encoded in the Folded State Ar…
Proteins have evolved through mutations, amino acid substitutions, since life appeared on Earth, some 109 years ago. The study of these phenomena has been of particular significance because of their impact on protein stability, function,…
We investigate theoretically the behavior of proteins as well as other large macromolecules which are incorporated into amphiphilic monolayers at the air-water interface. We assume the monolayer to be in the coexistence region of the…
We study the impact of mutations (changes in amino acid sequence) on the thermodynamics of simple protein-like heteropolymers consisting of N monomers, representing the amino acid sequence. The sequence is designed to fold into its native…
Focusing on a small set of proteins that i) fold in a concerted, all-or-none fashion and ii) do not contain knots or slipknots, we show that the Gauss linking integral, the torsion and the number of sequence-distant contacts provide…
Complex systems with tightly coadapted parts frequently appear in living systems and are difficult to account for through Darwinian evolution, that is random variation and natural selection, if the constituent parts are independently coded…
We investigate the formation of beta-sheet structures in proteins without taking into account specific sequence-dependent hydrophobic interactions. To accomplish this, we introduce a model which explicitly incorporates both solvation…
Although rare, an increasing number of proteins have been observed to contain entanglements in their native structures. To gain more insight into the significance of protein knotting, researchers have been investigating protein knot…
Understanding the observed variability in the number of homologs of a gene is a very important, unsolved problem that has broad implications for research into co-evolution of structure and function, gene duplication, pseudogene formation…
The folding transition of biopolymers from the coil to compact structures has attracted wide research interest in the past and is well studied in polymer physics. Recent seminal works on DNA in confined devices have shown that these long…
Atomic packing is an important metric for characterizing protein structures, as it significantly influences various features including the stability, the rate of evolution and the functional roles of proteins. Packing in protein structures…
The key finding in the DNA double helix model is the specific pairing or binding between nucleotides A-T and C-G, and the pairing rules are the molecule basis of genetic code. Unfortunately, no such rules have been discovered for proteins.…
Different aspects of protein folding are illustrated by simplified polymer models. Stressing the diversity of side chains (residues) leads one to view folding as the freezing transition of an heteropolymer. Technically, the most common…
The thermodynamics of proteins indicate that folding/unfolding takes place either through stable intermediates or through a two-state process without intermediates. The rather short folding times of the two-state process indicate that…
Globular proteins are expected to assume folds with fixed secondary structures, alpha-helices and beta-sheets. Fold-switching proteins challenge this expectation by remodeling their secondary and/or tertiary structures in response to…
The coil to globule transition of the polypeptide chain is the physical phenomenon behind the folding of globular proteins. Globular proteins with a single domain usually consist of about 30 to 100 amino acid residues, and this finite size…
The folding kinetics of a number of sequences for off-lattice continuum model of proteins is studied using Langevin simulations at two values of the friction coefficient. We show that there is a remarkable correlation between folding times,…
Recent advances in coarse-grained lattice and off-lattice protein models are reviewed. The sequence dependence of thermodynamical folding properties are investigated and evidence for non-randomness of the binary sequences of good folders…
The biological activity and functional specificity of proteins depend on their native three-dimensional structures determined by inter- and intra-molecular interactions. In this paper, we investigate the geometrical factor of protein…
Reaching a ground state of a spin system is analogous to a protein evolving into its native state. We study the ``folding'' times for various random Ising spin systems and determine characteristic temperatures that relate to the…
It has been conjectured that evolution exerted pressure to preserve amino acids bearing thermodynamic, kinetic, and functional roles. In this letter we show that the physical requirement to maintain protein stability gives rise to a…