Related papers: Loop-closure events during protein folding: Ration…
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…
Many native structures of proteins accomodate complex topological motifs such as knots, lassos, and other geometrical entanglements. How proteins can fold quickly even in the presence of such topological obstacles is a debated question in…
We solve a model that takes into account entropic barriers, frustration, and the organization of a protein-like molecule. For a chain of size $M$, there is an effective folding transition to an ordered structure. Without frustration, this…
The high computational cost of carrying out molecular dynamics simulations of even small-size proteins is a major obstacle in the study, at atomic detail and in explicit solvent, of the physical mechanism which is at the basis of 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 describe the results obtained from an improved model for protein folding. We find that a good agreement with the native structure of a 46 residue long, five-letter protein segment is obtained by carefully tuning the parameters of the…
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…
Natural protein sequences that self-assemble to form globular structures are compact with high packing densities in the folded states. It is known that proteins unfold upon addition of denaturants, adopting random coil structures. The…
Physical mechanisms underlying the empirical correlation between relative contact order (CO) and folding rate among naturally-occurring small single-domain proteins are investigated by evaluating postulated interaction schemes for a set of…
Models of protein energetics which neglect interactions between amino acids that are not adjacent in the native state, such as the Go model, encode or underlie many influential ideas on protein folding. Implicit in this simplification is a…
We consider six different secondary structures of proteins and construct two types of Go-type off-lattice models: with the steric constraints and without. The basic aminoacid-aminoacid potential is Lennard Jones for the native contacts and…
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 reduced protein model with five to six atoms per amino acid and five amino acid types is developed and tested on a three-helix-bundle protein, a 46-amino acid fragment from staphylococcal protein A. The model does not rely on the widely…
Proteins must fold quickly to acquire their biologically functional three-dimensional native structures. Hence, these are mainly stabilized by local contacts, while intricate topologies such as knots are rare. Here, we reveal the existence…
We test a simplified, local version of the helix model on two synthetic and two natural proteins, to study its efficiency in predicting the native secondary structure. The results we obtain are very good for the synthetic sequences, poorer…
$\alpha$-helices stand out as common and relatively invariant secondary structural elements of proteins. However, $\alpha$-helices are not rigid bodies and their deformations can be significant in protein function ({\it e.g.} coiled coils).…
Simplified Go models, where only native contacts interact favorably, have proven useful to characterize some aspects of the folding of small proteins. The success of these models is limited by the fact that all residues interact in the same…
We present a statistical approach to protein structure by introducing a representation of protein folds based on simple observables defined as frequencies of oriented cycles in contact graphs. Motivated by the idea that these cycles may…
We present a method to investigate the kinetics of protein folding on a long time-scale and the dynamics underlying the formation of secondary and tertiary structures during the entire reaction. The approach is based on the formal analogy…
The fundamental law for protein folding is the Thermodynamic Principle: the amino acid sequence of a protein determines its native structure and the native structure has the minimum Gibbs free energy. If all chemical problems can be…