Related papers: Design of Proteins with Specified Thermal Properti…
Recent advances in coarse-grained lattice and off-lattice protein models are reviewed. The sequence dependence of thermodynamical folding properties are investigated and evidence for non-randomness of the binary sequences of good folders…
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 perform a generalized-ensemble simulation of a small peptide taking the interactions among all atoms into account. From this simulation we obtain thermodynamic quantities over a wide range of temperatures. In particular, we show that the…
Protein folding and design are major biophysical problems, the solution of which would lead to important applications especially in medicine. Here a novel protein model capable of simultaneously provide quantitative protein design and…
Background: Designing amino acid sequences that are stable in a given target structure amounts to maximizing a conditional probability. A straightforward approach to accomplish this is a nested Monte Carlo where the conformation space is…
We study the thermodynamic behavior of a simple off-lattice model for protein folding. The model is two-dimensional and has two different ``amino acids''. Using numerical simulations of all chains containing eight or ten monomers, we…
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…
Monte Carlo simulations of a simple lattice model of protein folding show two distinct regimes depending on the chain length. The first regime well describes the folding of small protein sequences and its kinetic counterpart appears to be…
We report a single-copy tempering method for simulating large complex systems. In a generalized ensemble, the method uses runtime estimate of the thermal average energy computed from a novel integral identity to guide a continuous…
Using a simple three-dimensional lattice copolymer model and Monte Carlo dynamics, we study the collapse and folding of protein-like heteropolymers. The polymers are 27 monomers long and consist of two monomer types. Although these chains…
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…
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…
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 consider the statistical mechanics of a full set of two-dimensional protein-like heteropolymers, whose thermodynamics is characterized by the coil-to-globular ($T_\theta$) and the folding ($T_f$) transition temperatures. For our model,…
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…
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…
The number of protein structures is far less than the number of sequences. By imposing simple generic features of proteins (low energy and compaction) on all possible sequences we show that the structure space is sparse compared to the…
We study the thermodynamics and kinetics of folding for a small peptide. Our data rely on Monte Carlo simulations where the interactions among all atoms are taken into account. Monte Carlo kinetics is used to study folding of the peptide at…
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…
Folding kinetics of a lattice model of protein is studied. It uses the Random Energy Model for the intrachain couplings and a temperature dependent free energy of solvation derived from a realistic hydration model of apolar solutes. The…