Related papers: Role of the dihedral angle potential in the nuclea…
Different aspects of protein folding are illustrated by simplified polymer models. Stressing the diversity of side chains (residues) leads one to view folding as the freezing transition of an heteropolymer. Technically, the most common…
A reduced model, which can fold both helix and sheet structures, is proposed to study the problem of protein folding. The goal of this model is to find an unbiased effective potential that has included the effects of water and at the same…
For the vast majority of naturally occurring, small, single domain proteins folding is often described as a two-state process that lacks detectable intermediates. This observation has often been rationalized on the basis of a nucleation…
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…
Understanding how monomeric proteins fold under in vitro conditions is crucial to describing their functions in the cellular context. Significant advances both in theory and experiments have resulted in a conceptual framework for describing…
The proposal of this paper is to provide a simple angular random walk model to build up polypeptide structures, which encompass properties of dihedral angles of folded proteins. From this model, structures will be built with lengths ranging…
Protein folding is the intricate process by which a linear sequence of amino acids self-assembles into a unique three-dimensional structure. Protein folding kinetics is the study of pathways and time-dependent mechanisms a protein undergoes…
The motion involved in barrier crossing for protein folding are investigated in terms of the chain dynamics of the polymer backbone, completing the microscopic description of protein folding presented in the previous paper. Local reaction…
Using the Helmholtz decomposition of the vector field of folding fluxes in a two-dimensional space of collective variables, a potential of the driving force for protein folding is introduced. The potential has two components. One component…
A phenomenological model hamiltonian to describe the folding of a protein with any given sequence is proposed. The protein is thought of as a collection of pieces of helices; as a consequence its configuration space increases with the…
Hydrogen bonds are a common feature in protein folding and aggregation. Due to their chemical peculiarities in terms of strength and directionality, a particular attention must be paid to the definition of the hydrogen bond potential…
A coarse-grained off-lattice model that is not biased in any way to the native state is proposed to fold proteins. To predict the native structure in a reasonable time, the model has included the essential effects of water in an effective…
Predicting the three-dimensional (3D) functional structures of proteins remains an important computational milestone in molecular biology to be achieved. This feat is hinged on a clear understanding of the mechanism which proteins use to…
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…
A geometric analysis of protein folding, which complements many of the models in the literature, is presented. We examine the process from unfolded strand to the point where the strand becomes self-interacting. A central question is how it…
The principles underlying protein folding remains one of Nature's puzzles with important practical consequences for Life. An approach that has gathered momentum since the late 1990's, looks at protein hetero-polymers and their folding…
We propose a universal elastic energy for proteins, which depends only on the radius of gyration $R_{g}$ and the residue number $N$. It is constructed using physical arguments based on the hydrophobic effect and hydrogen bonding. Adjustable…
In this article the configurational space of two simple protein models consisting of polymers composed of a periodic sequence of four different kinds of monomers is studied as a function of temperature. In the protein models, hydrogen bond…
We present a statistical mechanics approach to the protein folding problem. We first review some of the basic properties of proteins, and introduce some physical models to describe their thermodynamics. These models rely on a random…
In order to understand the nuclei which develop during the course of protein folding and unfolding, we examine phase segregation of a single heteropolymer chain which occurs in equilibrium. These segregated conformations are characterized…