Related papers: Unfolding designable structures
Only about 1,000 qualitatively different protein folds are believed to exist in nature. Here, we review theoretical studies which suggest that some folds are intrinsically more designable than others, {\it i.e.} are lowest energy states of…
Protein structures are a very special class among all possible structures. It was suggested that a ``designability principle'' plays a crucial role in nature's selection of protein sequences and structures. Here we provide a theoretical…
The protein folding problem has attracted an increasing attention from physicists. The problem has a flavor of statistical mechanics, but possesses the most common feature of most biological problems -- the profound effects of evolution. I…
Lattice models, for their coarse-grained nature, are best suited for the study of the ``designability problem'', the phenomenon in which most of the about 16,000 proteins of known structure have their native conformations concentrated in a…
Protein folds are highly designable, in the sense that many sequences fold to the same conformation. In the present work we derive an expression for the designability in a 20 letter lattice model of proteins which, relying only on the…
In this work, we discovered a fundamental connection between selection for protein stability and emergence of preferred structures of proteins. Using standard exact 3-dimensional lattice model we evolve sequences starting from random ones…
Native protein folds often have a high degree of symmetry. We study the relationship between the symmetries of native proteins, and their designabilities -- how many different sequences encode a given native structure. Using a…
We examined what determines the designability of 2-letter codes (H and P) lattice proteins from three points of view. First, whether the native structure is searched within all possible structures or within maximally compact structures.…
By enumerating all sequences of length 20, we study the designability of structures in a two-dimensional Hydrophobic-Polar (HP) lattice model in a wide range of inter-monomer interaction parameters. We find that although the histogram of…
Protein structures in nature often exhibit a high degree of regularity (secondary structures, tertiary symmetries, etc.) absent in random compact conformations. We demonstrate in a simple lattice model of protein folding that structural…
Using an off-lattice model, we fully enumerate folded conformations of polypeptide chains of up to N = 19 monomers. Structures are found to differ markedly in designability, defined as the number of sequences with that structure as a unique…
Despite the variety of protein sizes, shapes, and backbone configurations found in nature, the design of novel protein folds remains an open problem. Within simple lattice models it has been shown that all structures are not equally…
In suitable environments, proteins, nucleic acids and certain synthetic polymers fold into unique conformations. This work shows that it is possible to construct lattice models of foldable heteropolymers by expressing the energy only in…
In the framework of a lattice-model study of protein folding, we investigate the interplay between designability, thermodynamic stability, and kinetics. To be ``protein-like'', heteropolymers must be thermodynamically stable, stable against…
We present an analytical method for determining the designability of protein structures. We apply our method to the case of two-dimensional lattice structures, and give a systematic solution for the spectrum of any structure. Using this…
A typical protein structure is a compact packing of connected alpha-helices and/or beta-strands. We have developed a method for generating the ensemble of compact structures a given set of helices and strands can form. The method is tested…
Understanding the principles of protein folding is a cornerstone of computational biology, with implications for drug design, bioengineering, and the understanding of fundamental biological processes. Lattice protein folding models offer a…
Making use of a simplified model for protein folding, it can be shown that conformations which are particularly stable when their energy is minimized with respect to amino acid sequence (in the sense that they display a large energy gap to…
We review the recent progress in computational approaches to protein design which builds on advances in statistical-mechanical protein folding theory. In particular, we evaluate the degeneracy of the protein code (i.e. how many sequences…
On the study of protein folding, our understanding about the protein structures is limited. In this paper we find one way to characterize the compact structures of lattice protein model. A quantity called Partnum is given to each compact…