Related papers: Chirality and Protein Folding
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 number of protein structures is far less than the number of sequences. By imposing simple generic features of proteins (low energy and compaction) on all possible sequences we show that the structure space is sparse compared to the…
Focusing on a small set of proteins that i) fold in a concerted, all-or-none fashion and ii) do not contain knots or slipknots, we show that the Gauss linking integral, the torsion and the number of sequence-distant contacts provide…
Natively unfolded proteins exist as an ensemble of flexible conformations lacking a well defined tertiary structure along a large portion of their polypeptide chain. Despite the absence of a stable configuration, they are involved in…
Lattice-model simulations and experiments of some small proteins suggest that folding is essentially controlled by a few conserved contacts. Residues of these conserved contacts form the minimum set of native contacts needed to ensure…
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…
A protein model with the pairwise interaction energies varying as local environment changes, i.e., including some kinds of collective effect between the contacts, is proposed. Lattice Monte Carlo simulations on the thermodynamical…
Recent advances in coarse-grained lattice and off-lattice protein models are reviewed. The sequence dependence of thermodynamical folding properties are investigated and evidence for non-randomness of the binary sequences of good folders…
A local equilibrium approach for the kinetics of a simplified protein folding model, whose equilibrium thermodynamics is exactly solvable, was developed in [M. Zamparo and A. Pelizzola, Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 068106 (2006)]. Important…
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…
Proteins fold to a specific functional conformation with a densely packed hydrophobic core that controls their stability. We develop a geometric, yet all-atom model for proteins that explains the universal core packing fraction of…
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…
Detecting conformational transitions in molecular systems is key to understanding biological processes. Here, we investigate the force variance in single-molecule pulling experiments as an indicator of molecular folding transitions. We…
The prediction of the three-dimensional structures of the native state of proteins from the sequences of their amino acids is one of the most important challenges in molecular biology. An essential ingredient to solve this problem within…
A theoretical model for the folding of proteins containing disulfide bonds is introduced. The model exploits the knowledge of the native state to favour the progressive establishment of native interactions. At variance with traditional…
Colloidal membranes, self assembled monolayers of aligned rod like molecules, offer a template for designing membranes with definite shapes and curvature, and possibly new functionalities in the future. Often the constituent rods, due to…
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 derive an expression with four adjustable parameters that reproduces well the 20x20 Miyazawa-Jernigan potential matrix extracted from known protein structures. The numerical values of the parameters can be approximately computed from the…
A complex network approach to protein folding is proposed. The graph object is the network of shortcut edges present in a native-state protein (SCN0). Although SCN0s are found via an intuitive message passing algorithm (S. Milgram,…
The development of quantitative methods for characterizing molecular chirality can provide an important tool for studying chirality induced phenomena in molecular systems. Significant progress has been made in recent years toward…