Related papers: A Thermodynamic Model for Prebiotic Protein Functi…
We report that protein confinement within nanoscopic vesicular compartments corresponds to a liquid-liquid phase transition with the protein/water within vesicle lumen interacting very differently than in bulk. We show this effect leads to…
We propose a general method for predicting potentially good folders from a given number of amino acid sequences. Our approach is based on the calculation of the rate of convergence of each amino acid chain towards the native structure using…
While all the information required for the folding of a protein is contained in its amino acid sequence, one has not yet learned how to extract this information to predict the three--dimensional, biologically active, native conformation of…
Mechanical unfolding of RNA structures, ranging from hairpins to ribozymes, using laser optical tweezer (LOT) experiments have begun to reveal the features of the energy landscape that cannot be easily explored using conventional…
The interplay between structure-search of the native structure and desolvation in protein folding has been explored using a minimalist model. These results support a folding mechanism where most of the structural formation of the protein is…
We study the statistical mechanics of RNA secondary structures designed to have an attraction between two different types of structures as a model system for heteropolymer aggregation. The competition between the branching entropy of the…
The formation of fibrillar aggregates seems to be a common characteristic of polypeptide chains, although the observation of these aggregates may depend on appropriate experimental conditions. Partially folded intermediates seem to have an…
The thermodynamic properties for three different types of off-lattice four-strand beta-sheet protein models interacting via a hybrid Go-type potential have been investigated. Discontinuous molecular dynamic simulations have been performed…
A novel combination of discontinuous molecular dynamics and the Langevin equation, together with an intermediate-resolution model, are used to carry out long (several $\mu$s) simulation and study folding transition and transport of proteins…
We propose a new approach for modelling the process of RNA folding as a graph transformation guided by the global value of free energy. Since the folding process evolves towards a configuration in which the free energy is minimal, the…
Many enhanced sampling methods, such as Umbrella Sampling, Metadynamics or Variationally Enhanced Sampling, rely on the identification of appropriate collective variables. For proteins, even small ones, finding appropriate collective…
In this paper, we propose a thermodynamic mechanism for the formation of transcriptional foci via the joint agglomeration of DNA-looping proteins and protein-binding domains on DNA: The competition between the gain in protein-DNA binding…
In spite of decades of research, much remains to be discovered about folding: the detailed structure of the initial (unfolded) state, vestigial folding instructions remaining only in the unfolded state, the interaction of the molecule with…
Knotted proteins embed a physical (i.e., open) knot within their native structures. For decades, significant effort has been devoted to elucidating the functional role of knots in proteins, yet no consensus has been reached. Here, using…
The computer-aided folding of biomolecules, particularly RNAs, is one of the most difficult challenges in computational structural biology. RNA tetraloops are fundamental RNA motifs playing key roles in RNA folding and RNA-RNA and…
Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) can fold into shapes that perform functions in the cell. These foldings are governed by Watson-Crick base pairing, namely Adenine to Uracil and Cytosine to Guanine (A-U and G-C). The properties of the H-P…
Protein folding is analyzed using a replica variational formalism to investigate some free energy landscape characteristics relevant for dynamics. A random contact interaction model that satisfies the minimum frustration principle is used…
RNA function crucially depends on its structure. Thermodynamic models currently used for secondary structure prediction rely on computing the partition function of folding ensembles, and can thus estimate minimum free-energy structures and…
Self-assembly of polypeptides into fibrillar structures can be initiated by planar surfaces that interact favorably with certain residues. Using a coarse grained model, we systematically studied the folding and adsorption behavior of a…
Exploring the protein-folding problem has been a long-standing challenge in molecular biology. Protein folding is highly dependent on folding of secondary structures as the way to pave a native folding pathway. Here, we demonstrate that a…