Related papers: Loop-closure events during protein folding: Ration…
Phi-values are experimental measures of how the kinetics of protein folding is changed by single-site mutations. Phi-values measure energetic quantities, but are often interpreted in terms of the structures of the transition state ensemble.…
Phi-values are experimental measures of the effects of mutations on the folding kinetics of a protein. A central question is which structural information Phi-values contain about the transition state of folding. Traditionally, a Phi-value…
We present a solvable model that predicts the folding kinetics of two-state proteins from their native structures. The model is based on conditional chain entropies. It assumes that folding processes are dominated by small-loop closure…
We apply a simulational proxy of the phi-value analysis and perform extensive mutagenesis experiments to identify the nucleating residues in the folding reactions of two small lattice Go polymers with different native geometries. These…
Simple theoretical concepts and models have been helpful to understand the folding rates and routes of single-domain proteins. As reviewed in this article, a physical principle that appears to underly these models is loop closure.
We use a free energy functional theory to elucidate general properties of heterogeneously ordering, fast folding proteins, and we test our conclusions with lattice simulations. We find that both structural and energetic heterogeneity can…
A microscopic theory of the free energy barriers and folding routes for minimally frustrated proteins is presented, greatly expanding on the presentation of the variational approach outlined previously [J. J. Portman, S. Takada, P. G.…
Small single-domain proteins often exhibit only a single free-energy barrier, or transition state, between the denatured and the native state. The folding kinetics of these proteins is usually explored via mutational analysis. A central…
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…
The folding kinetics of a number of sequences for off-lattice continuum model of proteins is studied using Langevin simulations at two values of the friction coefficient. We show that there is a remarkable correlation between folding times,…
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…
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…
Two proteins, one belonging to the mainly alpha class and the other belonging to the alpha/beta class, are selected to test a kinetic mechanism for protein folding. Targeted molecular dynamics is applied to generate folding pathways for…
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,…
In this study we evaluate, at full atomic detail, the folding processes of two small helical proteins, the B domain of protein A and the Villin headpiece. Folding kinetics are studied by performing a large number of ab initio Monte Carlo…
The folding of a polypeptide is an example of the cooperative effects of the amino-acid residues. Of recent interest is how a secondary structure, such as a helix, spontaneously forms during the collapse of a peptide from an initial…
We propose that protein loops can be interpreted as topological domain-wall solitons. They interpolate between ground states that are the secondary structures like alpha-helices and beta-strands. Entire proteins can then be folded simply by…
The process of protein folding from an unfolded state to a biologically active, folded conformation is governed by many parameters e.g the sequence of amino acids, intermolecular interactions, the solvent, temperature and chaperon…
We consider the statistical mechanics of a full set of two-dimensional protein-like heteropolymers, whose thermodynamics is characterized by the coil-to-globular ($T_\theta$) and the folding ($T_f$) transition temperatures. For our model,…
We discuss recent theoretical developments in the study of simple lattice models of proteins. Such models are designed to understand general features of protein structures and mechanism of folding. Among the topics covered are (i) the use…