Related papers: Geometry of compact tubes and protein structures
Carbon nanotubes and biological filaments each spontaneously assemble into kinked helices, rings, and "tennis racket" shapes due to competition between elastic and interfacial effects. We show that the slender geometry is a more important…
One of the molecular properties most intuitive to the human perception is the geometrical shape. However, when exploring a large chemical space the determination of shape needs to be automated. We present a fast and simple approach to…
Spatial organisation is a hallmark of all living cells, and recreating it in model systems is a necessary step in the creation of synthetic cells. It is therefore of both fundamental and practical interest to better understand the basic…
Polymer fibers consist of macromolecules oriented along the fiber axis. Better alignment of chains leads to an increased strength of the fiber. It is believed that the key factor preventing formation of a perfectly oriented fiber is…
Changes in the extent of local concavity along with changes in surface roughness of binding sites of proteins have long been considered as useful markers to identify functional sites of proteins. However, an algorithm that describes the…
The classical approach to protein folding inspired by statistical mechanics avoids the high dimensional structure of the conformation space by using effective coordinates. Here we introduce a network approach to capture the statistical…
We consider the continuum limit of a recently-introduced model for discretized thick polymers, or tubes. We address both analytically and numerically how the polymer thickness influences the decay of tangent-tangent correlations and find…
Spatial organization of proteins in cells is important for many biological functions. In general, the nonlinear, spatially coupled models for protein-pattern formation are only accessible to numerical simulations, which has limited insight…
The extent of coupling between the folding of a protein and its binding to a substrate varies from protein to protein. Some proteins have highly structured native states in solution, while others are natively disordered and only fold fully…
Cellular functions are established through biological evolution, but are constrained by the laws of physics. For instance, the physics of protein folding limits the lengths of cellular polypeptide chains. Consequently, many cellular…
Bin/Amphiphysin/Rvs superfamily proteins and other curvature-inducing proteins have anisotropic shapes and anisotropically bend biomembrane. Here, we report how the anisotropic proteins bind the membrane tube and are orientationally ordered…
We explain the physical basis of a model for small globular proteins with water interactions. The water is supposed to access the protein interior in an "all-or-none" manner during the unfolding of the protein chain. As a consequence of…
Proteins have regular tertiary structures but irregular amino acid sequences. This made it very difficult to decode the structural information in the protein sequences. Here we demonstrate that many small alpha protein domains have hidden…
We introduce a framework for adsorption of a single polymer in which the topology of the polymer is quenched before adsorption, in contrast to more standard adsorption models having annealed topology. Our "topology" refers either to the…
Nanoscale and microscale confinement of biopolymers naturally occurs in cells and has been recently achieved in artificial structures designed for nanotechnological applications. Here, we present an extensive theoretical investigation of…
Inherent structure theory is used to discover strong connections between simple characteristics of protein structure and the energy landscape of a Go model. The potential energies and vibrational free energies of inherent structures are…
The analysis of the three-dimensional structure of proteins is an important topic in molecular biochemistry. Structure plays a critical role in defining the function of proteins and is more strongly conserved than amino acid sequence over…
A small model polypeptide represented in atomic detail is folded using Monte Carlo dynamics. The polypeptide is designed to have a native conformation similar to the central part of the helix-turn-helix protein ROP. Starting from a…
Protein-protein interactions (protein functionalities) are mediated by water, which compacts individual proteins and promotes close and temporarily stable large-area protein-protein interfaces. In their classic paper Kyte and Doolittle (KD)…
The aim of this paper is to investigate the distribution of a continuous polymer in the presence of an attractive finitely supported potential. The most intricate behavior can be observed if we simultaneously and independently vary two…