Related papers: The architecture of the protein domain universe
It has recently been discovered that many biological systems, when represented as graphs, exhibit a scale-free topology. One such system is the set of structural relationships among protein domains. The scale-free nature of this and other…
Background: Recent models of genome-proteome evolution have shown that some of the key traits displayed by the global structure of cellular networks might be a natural result of a duplication-diversification (DD) process. One of the…
Understanding of the evolutionary origins of protein structures represents a key component of the understanding of molecular evolution as a whole. Here we seek to elucidate how the features of an underlying protein structural "space" might…
Proteins, by virtue of their central role in most biological processes, represent one of the key subjects of the study of molecular evolution. Inherent to the indispensability of proteins for living cells is the fact that a given protein…
In this work we propose a physical model of organismal evolution, where phenotype, organism life expectancy, is directly related to genotype i.e. the stability of its proteins which can be determined exactly in the model. Simulating the…
Emergence of new protein structures has proved difficult to trace in nature and engineer in the laboratory. However, one aspect of structure evolution has proved immensely helpful for determining the three-dimensional structure of proteins…
Here we review the development of protein scaling theory, starting from backgrounds in mathematics and statistical mechanics, and leading to biomedical applications. Evolution has organized each protein family in different ways, but scaling…
Geometric and structural constraints greatly restrict the selection of folds adapted by protein backbones, and yet, folded proteins show an astounding diversity in functionality. For structure to have any bearing on function, it is thus…
In this work, we discovered a fundamental connection between selection for protein stability and emergence of preferred structures of proteins. Using standard exact 3-dimensional lattice model we evolve sequences starting from random ones…
In protein-protein interaction networks certain topological properties appear to be recurrent: networks maps are considered scale-free. It is possible that this topology is reflected in the protein structure. In this paper we investigate…
Understanding the observed variability in the number of homologs of a gene is a very important, unsolved problem that has broad implications for research into co-evolution of structure and function, gene duplication, pseudogene formation…
Protein sequences serve as a natural record of the evolutionary constraints that shape their functional structures. We show that it is possible to use only sequence information to go beyond predicting native structures and global stability…
The intricate three-dimensional geometries of protein tertiary structures underlie protein function and emerge through a folding process from one-dimensional chains of amino acids. The exact spatial sequence and configuration of amino…
Protein domains are found on genomes with notable statistical distributions, which bear a high degree of similarity. Previous work has shown how these distributions can be accounted for by simple models, where the main ingredients are…
Cooperativity is a hallmark of proteins, many of which show a modular architecture comprising discrete structural domains. Detecting and describing dynamic couplings between structural regions is difficult in view of the many-body nature of…
Self-assembly processes are widespread in nature, and lie at the heart of many biological and physical phenomena. The characteristics of self-assembly building blocks determine the structures that they form. Two crucial properties are the…
The protein folding problem must ultimately be solved on all length scales from the atomic up through a hierarchy of complicated structures. By analyzing the stability of the folding process using physics and mathematics, this paper shows…
Protein structures are a very special class among all possible structures. It was suggested that a ``designability principle'' plays a crucial role in nature's selection of protein sequences and structures. Here we provide a theoretical…
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,…
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…