Related papers: Remark on Protein Collapse from a Random Walk
In two dimensions polymer collapse has been shown to be complex with multiple low temperature states and multi-critical points. Recently, strong numerical evidence has been provided for a long-standing prediction of universal scaling of…
We have performed parallel tempering Monte Carlo simulations using a simple continuum heteropolymer model for proteins. All ten heteropolymer sequences which we have studied have shown first-order transitions at low temperature to ordered…
A mean field rate theory description of the homo- and co-polymerization of $f$-functional molecules is developed, which contains the formation of short cyclic structures inside the network. The predictions of this model are compared with…
Conformational transitions of flexible molecules, especially those driven by hydrophobic effects, tend to be hindered by desolvation barriers. For such transitions, it is thus important to characterize and understand the interplay between…
We investigate numerically the dynamical behaviour of a polymer chain collapsing in a dilute solution. The rate of collapse is measured with and without the presence of hydrodynamic interactions. We find that hydrodynamic interactions both…
We investigate the process of biopolymer translocation through a narrow pore using a multiscale approach which explicitly accounts for the hydrodynamic interactions of the molecule with the surrounding solvent. The simulations confirm that…
We present results of molecular simulations of a model protein whose hydrophobic collapse proceeds as a cascade of downhill transitions between distinct intermediate states. Different intermediates are stabilized by means of appropriate…
We investigate the kinetics of a polymer collapse due to the formation of irreversible crosslinks between its monomers. Using the contact probability $P(s)$ as a scale-dependent order parameter depending on the chemical distance $s$, our…
In a recent letter, a simple method was proposed to generate solvable models that predict the critical properties of statistical systems in hyperspherical geometries. To that end, it was shown how to reduce a random walk in $D$ dimensions…
Experiments show that macromolecular crowding modestly reduces the size of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) even at volume fraction ($\phi$) similar to that in the cytosol whereas DNA undergoes a coil-to-globule transition at very…
In this paper we present a method to study the folding structure of a simple model consisting of two kinds of monomers, hydrophobic and hydrophilic. This method has three main steps: an efficient simulation method to bring an open sequence…
We introduce a polymer model where the transition from swollen to compact configurations is due to interactions between the monomers and the solvent. These interactions are the origin of the effective attractive interactions between…
Applying multicanonical simulations we investigated folding properties of off-lattice heteropolymers employing a mesoscopic hydrophobic-polar model. We study for various sequences folding channels in the free-energy landscape by comparing…
We consider polymers in which M randomly selected pairs of monomers are restricted to be in contact. Analytical arguments and numerical simulations show that an ideal (Gaussian) chain of N monomers remains expanded as long as M<<N; its mean…
We propose an off-lattice model for a self-avoiding homopolymer chain with two different competing attractive interactions, mimicking the hydrophobic effect and the hydrogen bond formation respectively. By means of Monte Carlo simulations,…
Within the frame of an effective, coarse-grained hydrophobic-polar protein model, we employ multicanonical Monte Carlo simulations to investigate free-energy landscapes and folding channels of exemplified heteropolymer sequences, which are…
We propose a new analytic approach to study the phase diagram of random heteropolymers, based on the cavity method. For copolymers we analyze the nature and phenomenology of the glass transition as a function of sequence correlations.…
Folding channels and free-energy landscapes of hydrophobic-polar heteropolymers are discussed on the basis of a minimalistic off-lattice coarse-grained model. We investigate how rearrangements of hydrophobic and polar monomers in a…
We have analyzed the equilibrium response of chain molecules to stretching. For a homogeneous sequence of monomers, the induced transition from compact globule to extended coil below the $\theta$-temperature is predicted to be sharp. For…
Unstructured proteins can modulate cellular responses to environmental conditions by undergoing coil-globule transitions and phase separation. However, the molecular mechanisms of these phenomena still need to be fully understood. Here, we…