Related papers: Structurally constrained protein evolution: result…
Species or population that proliferate faster than others become dominant in numbers. Catalysis allows catalytic sets within a molecular reaction network to dominate the non catalytic parts of the network by processing most of the available…
Evolutionary dynamics and patterns of molecular evolution are strongly influenced by selection on linked regions of the genome, but our quantitative understanding of these effects remains incomplete. Recent work has focused on predicting…
Cellular differentiation and evolution are stochastic processes that can involve multiple types (or states) of particles moving on a complex, high-dimensional state-space or "fitness" landscape. Cells of each specific type can thus be…
Dynamical patterns in complex networks of coupled oscillators are both of theoretical and practical interest, yet to fully reveal and understand the interplay between pattern emergence and network structure remains to be an outstanding…
The folding dynamics of small single-domain proteins is a current focus of simulations and experiments. Many of these proteins are 'two-state folders', i.e. proteins that fold rather directly from the denatured state to the native state,…
Repeat proteins are made with tandem copies of similar amino acid stretches that fold into elongated architectures. Due to their symmetry, these proteins constitute excellent model systems to investigate how evolution relates to structure,…
BACKGROUND: Many of the mutations accumulated by naturally evolving proteins are neutral in the sense that they do not significantly alter a protein's ability to perform its primary biological function. However, new protein functions evolve…
The past decade has witnessed the development and success of coarse-grained network models of proteins for predicting many equilibrium properties related to collective modes of motion. Curiously, the results are usually robust towards the…
Here we present an approximate analytical theory for the relationship between a protein structure's contact matrix and the shape of its energy spectrum in amino acid sequence space. We demonstrate a dependence of the number of sequences of…
Proteins are responsible for the most diverse set of functions in biology. The ability to extract information from protein sequences and to predict the effects of mutations is extremely valuable in many domains of biology and medicine.…
The ability to computationally generate novel yet physically foldable protein structures could lead to new biological discoveries and new treatments targeting yet incurable diseases. Despite recent advances in protein structure prediction,…
We present a model, based on symmetry and geometry, for proteins. Using elementary ideas from mathematics and physics, we derive the geometries of discrete helices and sheets. We postulate a compatible solvent-mediated emergent pairwise…
The coding space of protein sequences is shaped by evolutionary constraints set by requirements of function and stability. We show that the coding space of a given protein family--the total number of sequences in that family--can be…
Predicting the structure of multi-protein complexes is a grand challenge in biochemistry, with major implications for basic science and drug discovery. Computational structure prediction methods generally leverage pre-defined structural…
The majority of mammalian genomic transcripts do not directly code for proteins and it is currently believed that most of these are not under evolutionary constraint. However given the abundance non-coding RNA (ncRNA) and its strong…
Cells can often choose among several stably heritable phenotypes. Examples are the expression of genes in eukaryotic cells where long chromosomal regions can adopt persistent and heritable silenced or active states, that may be associated…
The mutation-selection mechanism of Darwinian evolution gives rise not only to adaptation to environmental conditions but also to the enhancement of robustness against mutations. When two or more phenotypes have the same fitness value, the…
Despite the importance of a thermodynamically stable structure with a conserved fold for protein function, almost all evolutionary models neglect site-site correlations that arise from physical interactions between neighboring amino acid…
If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as…
We study genetic networks that produce many species of non-coding RNA molecules that are present at a moderate density, as typically exists in the cell. The associations of the many species of these RNA are modeled physically, taking into…