Related papers: A Thermodynamic Model for Prebiotic Protein Functi…
Recent single-molecule pulling experiments have shown how it is possible to manipulate RNA molecules using optical tweezers force microscopy. We investigate a minimal model for the experimental setup which includes a RNA molecule connected…
We investigate the interplay between post-translational folding and escape of two small single-domain proteins at the ribosomal exit tunnel by using Langevin dynamics with coarse-grained models. It is shown that at temperatures lower or…
First shells of hydration and bulk solvent plays a crucial role in the folding of proteins. Here, the role of water in the dynamics of proteins has been investigated using a theoretical protein-solvent model and a statistical physics…
Folding and aggregation of proteins, the interaction between proteins and membranes, as well as the adsorption of organic soft matter to inorganic solid substrates belong to the most interesting challenges in understanding structure and…
Existing state-of-the-art methods that take a single RNA sequence and predict the corresponding RNA secondary-structure are thermodynamic methods. These predict the most stable RNA structure, but do not consider the process of structure…
Secondary structure formation of nucleic acids strongly depends on salt concentration and temperature. We develop a theory for RNA folding that correctly accounts for sequence effects, the entropic contributions associated with loop…
The folding of RNA and DNA strands plays crucial roles in biological systems and bionanotechnology. However, studying these processes with high-resolution numerical models is beyond current computational capabilities due to the timescales…
We use mesoscopic non-equilibrium thermodynamics theory to describe RNA unfolding under tension. The theory introduces reaction coordinates, characterizing a continuum of states for each bond in the molecule. The unfolding considered is so…
Natural proteins fold to a unique, thermodynamically dominant state. Modeling of the folding process and prediction of the native fold of proteins are two major unsolved problems in biophysics. Here, we show successful all-atom ab initio…
Proteins work only if folded in their native state, but changes in temperature T and pressure P induce their unfolding. Therefore for each protein there is a stability region (SR) in the T-P thermodynamic plane outside which the biomolecule…
We present a novel statistical mechanics formalism for the theoretical description of the process of protein folding$\leftrightarrow$unfolding transition in water environment. The formalism is based on the construction of the partition…
We investigate the possibility of extending the notion of temperature in a stochastic model for the RNA/protein folding driven out of equilibrium. We simulate the dynamics of a small RNA hairpin subject to an external pulling force, which…
As a consequence of the rugged landscape of RNA molecules their folding is described by the kinetic partitioning mechanism according to which only a small fraction ($\phi_F$) reaches the folded state while the remaining fraction of…
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…
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…
The statistical mechanics of heteropolymer structure formation is studied in the context of RNA secondary structures. A designed RNA sequence biased energetically towards a particular native structure (a hairpin) is used to study the…
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 present results of Monte Carlo computer simulations of a coarse-grained hydrophobic-polar Go-like heteropolymer model and discuss thermodynamic properties and kinetics of an exemplified heteropolymer, exhibiting two-state folding…
A general theoretical framework is developed using free energy functional methods to understand the effects of heterogeneity in the folding of a well-designed protein. Native energetic heterogeneity arising from non-uniformity in native…
We provide evidence that the energy landscapes of folded proteins do not shift with temperature, but the onset of functional dynamics is associated with its effective sampling. The motion of the backbone is described by three distinct…