Related papers: Evolution and Mutations of Beta 2 Microglobulin
We consider the hydrodynamics of lipid bilayers containing transmembrane proteins of arbitrary shape. This biologically-motivated problem is relevant to the cell membrane, whose fluctuating dynamics play a key role in phenomena ranging from…
Small molecules are often found to exhibit extraordinarily diverse biological activities. Metformin is one of them. It is widely used as anti-diabetic drug for type-two diabetes. In addition to that, metformin hydrochloride shows…
How does immune system evolve functional proteins - potent antibodies - in such a short time? We address this question using a microscopic, protein-level, sequence-based model of humoral immune response with explicitly defined interactions…
More virulent strains of influenza virus subtypes H1N1 appeared in 2007 and H3N2 in 2011. The amino acid differences from prior less virulent strains appear to be small when tabulated through sequence alignments and counting site identities…
By performing molecular dynamics simulations with up to 132 million coarse-grained particles in half-micron sized boxes, we show that hydrodynamics quantitatively explains the finite-size effects on diffusion of lipids, proteins, and carbon…
The ability to absorb mutations while retaining structure and function, or mutational robustness, is a remarkable property of natural proteins. In this Letter, we use a computational model of organismic evolution [Zeldovich et al, PLOS Comp…
Biofilms are bacterial aggregates that grow on moist surfaces. Thin homogeneous biofilms naturally formed on the walls of conducts may serve as biosensors, providing information on the status of microsystems (MEMS) without disrupting them.…
We review and further develop an analytical model that describes how thermodynamic constraints on the stability of the native state influence protein evolution in a site-specific manner. To this end, we represent both protein sequences and…
Dynamin is a ubiquitous GTPase that tubulates lipid bilayers and is implicated in many membrane severing processes in eukaryotic cells. Setting the grounds for a better understanding of this biological function, we develop a generalized…
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 study the folding thermodynamics of a beta-hairpin and two three-stranded beta-sheet peptides using a simplified sequence-based all-atom model, in which folding is driven mainly by backbone hydrogen bonding and effective hydrophobic…
Influenza virus contains two highly variable envelope glycoproteins, hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA). The structure and properties of HA, which is responsible for binding the virus to the cell that is being infected, change…
Water is vital for life, and without it biomolecules and cells cannot maintain their structures and functions. The remarkable properties of water originate from its ability to form hydrogen-bonding networks and dynamics, which the…
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…
In this work we employ various methods of analysis (unfolding simulations and comparative analysis of structures and sequences of proteomes of thermophilic organisms) to show that organisms can follow two major strategies of thermophilic…
We study the shape dynamics of a two-component fluid membrane, using a dynamical triangulation monte carlo simulation and a Langevin description. Phase separation induces morphology changes depending on the lateral mobility of the lipids.…
Molecular dynamics simulations are performed to study the temperature-dependent dynamics and structures of the hydration shells of elastin-like and collagen-like peptides. For both model peptides, it is consistently observed that, upon…
Protein dynamics form a critical bridge between protein structure and function, yet the impact of evolution on ultrafast processes inside proteins remains enigmatic. This study delves deep into nanosecond-scale protein dynamics of a…
Microtubule dynamic instability arises from the hydrolysis of GTP bound to the beta-monomer of the tubulin dimer. The conformational change induced by hydrolysis is unknown, but microtubules disassemble into protofilaments of GDP-bound…
Comments: 6 pages RevTeX, 6 Postscript figures. We review a statistical mechanics treatment of the stability of globular proteins based on a simple model Hamiltonian taking into account protein self interactions and protein-water…