Related papers: Allostery and Kinetic Proofreading
Several physical mechanisms have been proposed to explain allostery in proteins. They differ by the number of internal states that they assume a protein to occupy, leaving open the question of what controls the emergence of these distinct…
The differing ability of polypeptide conformations to act as the native state of proteins has long been rationalized in terms of differing kinetic accessibility or thermodynamic stability. Building on the successful applications of physical…
The prediction of battery rate performance traditionally relies on computation-intensive numerical simulations. While simplified analytical models have been developed to accelerate the calculation, they usually assume battery performance to…
Protein electrostatic states have been demonstrated to play crucial roles in catalysis, ligand binding, protein stability, and in the modulation of allosteric effects. Electrostatic states are demonstrated to appear conserved among DEAD-box…
Water plays a major role in bio-systems, greatly contributing to determine their structure, stability and even function. It is well know, for instance, that proteins require a minimum amount of water to be functionally active. Since the…
Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) underpins modern molecular biology, yet its deployment in emerging domains such as DNA data storage and distributed diagnostics remains constrained by bulky thermocyclers, complex thermal hardware, and…
Analytical formulas for effective drift, diffusivity, run times, and run lengths are derived for an intracellular transport system consisting of a cargo attached to two cooperative but not identical molecular motors (for example, kinesin-1…
Folding kinetics of a lattice model of protein is studied. It uses the Random Energy Model for the intrachain couplings and a temperature dependent free energy of solvation derived from a realistic hydration model of apolar solutes. The…
The cytoskeleton -- a collection of polymeric filaments, molecular motors, and crosslinkers -- is a foundational example of active matter, and in the cell assembles into organelles that guide basic biological functions. Simulation of…
The cytoskeleton provides eukaryotic cells with mechanical support and helps them perform their biological functions. It is a network of semiflexible polar protein filaments and many accessory proteins that bind to these filaments, regulate…
Here we generalize our previous model of molecular motors trafficking subdiffusing cargos in viscoelastic cytosol by (i) including mechanochemical coupling between cyclic conformational fluctuations of the motor protein driven by the…
By converting energy into mechanical work, engines play a central role in most biological and technological processes. In particular, within the current trend towards the development of nanoscience and nanotechnology, microscopic engines…
We aim to identify the control principles governing the adaptable formation of non-equilibrium structures in actomyosin networks. We build a phenomenological model and predict that biasing the energy dissipated by molecular motors should…
Synthesis of protein molecules in a cell are carried out by ribosomes. A ribosome can be regarded as a molecular motor which utilizes the input chemical energy to move on a messenger RNA (mRNA) track that also serves as a template for the…
With the formal construction of a thermodynamic spring, I describe the mechanics, energetics, entropy, and kinetics of a binary mechanical model system. A protein that transitions between two metastable structural states behaves as a…
Engineering molecular systems that exhibit complex behavior requires the design of kinetic barriers. For example, an effective catalytic pathway must have a large barrier when the catalyst is absent. While programming such energy barriers…
A Stirling engine made of a colloidal particle in contact with a nonequilibrium bath is considered and analyzed with the tools of stochastic energetics. We model the bath by non Gaussian persistent noise acting on the colloidal particle.…
A system containing a pre-steady state standard (non-autocatalytic) reaction, with multiple paths, evolves toward a kinetic state with the minimum attainable activation free energy. Displacement of the path frequency distribution in this…
A variety of biomolecular systems rely on exploratory dynamics to reach target locations or states within a cell. Without a mechanism to remotely sense and move directly towards a target, the system must sample over many paths, often…
To address the large gap between time scales that can be easily reached by molecular simulations and those required to understand protein dynamics, we propose a rapid self-consistent approximation of the side chain free energy at every…