Related papers: Factors Governing the Foldability of Proteins
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…
We present an analysis of the effects of global topology on the structural stability of folded proteins in thermal equilibrium with a heat bath. For a large class of single domain proteins, we computed the harmonic spectrum within the…
We argue that protein native state structures reside in a novel "phase" of matter which confers on proteins their many amazing characteristics. This phase arises from the common features of all globular proteins and is characterized by a…
Many of the concepts which are at the basis of the development associated with a quantitative treatment of the variety of phenomena associated with the spontaneous breaking of gauge symmetry in nuclei have been instrumental in connection…
Molecular dynamics studies of Go models of proteins with the 10-12 contact potential and the bond and dihedral angle terms indicate statistical similarities to other Go models, e.g. with the Lennard-Jones contact potentials. The folding…
Within the frame of an effective, coarse-grained hydrophobic-polar protein model, we employ multicanonical Monte Carlo simulations to investigate free-energy landscapes and folding channels of exemplified heteropolymer sequences, which are…
We study the dynamics of protein folding via statistical energy-landscape theory. In particular, we concentrate on the local-connectivity case with the folding progress described by the fraction of native conformations. We obtain…
Evidence is presented suggesting, for the first time, that the protein foldability metric sigma=(T_theta - T_f)/T_theta, where T_theta and T_f are, respectively, the collapse and folding transition temperatures, could be used also to…
In the protein sequence space, natural proteins form clusters of families which are characterized by their unique native folds whereas the great majority of random polypeptides are neither clustered nor foldable to unique structures. Since…
We present a theoretical study of the folding of small proteins inside confining potentials. Proteins are described in the framework of an effective potential model which contains the Ramachandran angles as degrees of freedom and does not…
We propose a new and effective means for designing stable and fast-folding polypeptide sequences using a cumulant expansion of the molecular partition function. This method is unique in that $T_{Z}$, the ``cumulant design temperature''…
By balancing the average energy gap with its typical change due to mutations for protein-like heteropolymers with M residues, we show that native states are unstable to mutations on a scale M* ~ (lambda/sigma_mu)^(1/zeta_s), where lambda is…
In order to extend the results obtained with minimal lattice models to more realistic systems, we study a model where proteins are described as a chain of 20 kinds of structureless amino acids moving in a continuum space and interacting…
What energetic and solvation effects underlie the remarkable two-state thermodynamics and folding/unfolding kinetics of small single-domain proteins? To address this question, we investigate the folding and unfolding of a hierarchy of…
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 a numerical Monte Carlo analysis of a continuos spin Ising chain that can describe the statistical proterties of folded proteins. We find that depending on the value of the Metropolis temperature, the model displays the three…
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…
Growing experimental evidence shows that proteins follow one or a few distinct paths when folding. We propose in this paper a procedure to parametrize these observed pathways, and from this parametrization construct effective Hamiltonians…
We apply a simulational proxy of the phi-value analysis and perform extensive mutagenesis experiments to identify the nucleating residues in the folding reactions of two small lattice Go polymers with different native geometries. These…
We study a homopolymer model of a protein chain, where each monomer carries a dipole moment. To mimic the geometry of the peptidic bond, these dipoles are constrained to be locally perpendicular to the chain. The tensorial character of the…