Related papers: A dynamical approach to protein folding

A geometric analysis of protein folding, which complements many of the models in the literature, is presented. We examine the process from unfolded strand to the point where the strand becomes self-interacting. A central question is how it…

For the vast majority of naturally occurring, small, single domain proteins folding is often described as a two-state process that lacks detectable intermediates. This observation has often been rationalized on the basis of a nucleation…

We present a sequence-based probabilistic formalism that directly addresses co-operative effects in networks of interacting positions in proteins, providing significantly improved contact prediction, as well as accurate quantitative…

Exploring and understanding the protein-folding problem has been a long-standing challenge in molecular biology. Here, using molecular dynamics simulation, we reveal how parallel distributed adjacent planar peptide groups of unfolded…

We explore the consequences of very high dimensionality in the dynamical landscape of protein folding. Consideration of both typical range of stabilising interactions, and folding rates themselves, leads to a model of the energy…

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…

We study folding in 16-monomer heteropolymers on the square lattice. For a given sequence, thermodynamic properties and stability of the native state are unique. However, the kinetics of folding depends on the model of dynamics adopted for…

A reduced model, which can fold both helix and sheet structures, is proposed to study the problem of protein folding. The goal of this model is to find an unbiased effective potential that has included the effects of water and at the same…

To what extent do general features of folding/unfolding kinetics of small globular proteins follow from their thermodynamic properties? To address this question, we investigate a new simplifed protein chain model that embodies a cooperative…

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…

How proteins fold remains a central unsolved problem in biology. While the idea of a folding code embedded in the amino acid sequence was introduced more than 6 decades ago, this code remains undefined. While we now have powerful predictive…

We present the development of the idea to use dynamics in the space of contact maps as a computational approach to the protein folding problem. We first introduce two important technical ingredients, the reconstruction of a three…

The dynamical chaos in Lennard-Jones toy models of heteropolymers is studied by molecular dynamics simulations. It is shown that two nearby trajectories quickly diverge from each other if the heteropolymer corresponds to a random sequence.…

Motivation: Protein folding is a dynamic process during which a protein's amino acid sequence undergoes a series of 3-dimensional (3D) conformational changes en route to reaching a native 3D structure; the resulting 3D structural…

Over the years, advances in experimental and computational methods have helped us to understand the role of thermodynamic, kinetic and active (chaperone-aided) effects in coordinating the folding steps required to achieving a knotted native…

We recently introduced a physical model [Hoang et al., P. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA (2004), Banavar et al., Phys. Rev. E (2004)] for proteins which incorporates, in an approximate manner, several key features such as the inherent anisotropy of a…

Protein folding is one of the age-old biological problems that refers to the mechanism of understanding and predicting how a protein's linear sequence of amino acids folds into its specific three dimensional structure.This structure is…

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,''…

We adopt the point of view that analysis of the stability of the protein folding process is central to understanding the underlying physics of folding. Stability of the folding process means that many perturbations do not disrupt the…

We present the results of a self-consistent, unified molecular dynamics study of simple model heteropolymers in the continuum with emphasis on folding, sequence design and the determination of the interaction parameters of the effective…