Related papers: Protein crystallization in vivo
The ability to control the crystallization behaviour (including its absence) of particles, be they biomolecules such as globular proteins, inorganic colloids, nanoparticles, or metal atoms in an alloy, is of both fundamental and…
Understanding protein self-assembly is important for many biological and industrial processes. Proteins can self-assemble into crystals, filaments, gels, and other amorphous aggregates. The final forms include virus capsids and condensed…
Theories of protein crystallization based on spheres that form close-packed crystals predict optimal assembly within a `slot' of second virial coefficients and enhanced assembly near the metastable liquid-vapor critical point. However, most…
Crystallography may be the gold standard of protein structure determination, but obtaining the necessary high-quality crystals is also in some ways akin to prospecting for the precious metal. The tools and models developed in soft matter…
X-ray crystallography is the predominant method for obtaining atomic-scale information about biological macromolecules. Despite the success of the technique, obtaining well diffracting crystals still critically limits going from protein to…
In living cells, proteins self-assemble into large functional structures based on specific interactions between molecularly complex patches. Due to this complexity, protein self-assembly results from a competition between a large number of…
Cellular functions are established through biological evolution, but are constrained by the laws of physics. For instance, the physics of protein folding limits the lengths of cellular polypeptide chains. Consequently, many cellular…
A probabilistic discrete model for 2D protein crystal growth is presented. This model takes into account the available space and can describe growing processes of different nature due to the versatility of its parameters which gives the…
In this perspective we address the question: why are proteins seemingly so hard to crystallize? We suggest that this is because of evolutionary negative design, i.e. proteins have evolved not to crystallize, because crystallization, as with…
We use computer simulation to study crystal-forming model proteins equipped with interactions that are both orientationally specific and nonspecific. Distinct dynamical pathways of crystal formation can be selected by tuning the strengths…
Advances in experimental techniques and in theoretical models have improved our understanding of protein crystallization. But they have also left open questions regarding the protein phase behavior and self-assembly kinetics, such as why…
The fields of structural biology and soft matter have independently sought out fundamental principles to rationalize protein crystallization. Yet the conceptual differences and the limited overlap between the two disciplines have thus far…
Proteins must bind to specific other proteins in vivo in order to function. The proteins must bind only to one or a few other proteins of the of order a thousand proteins typically present in vivo. Using a simple model of a protein,…
Crystallization of proteins, specifically proteins of medical relevance, is performed for various reasons such as to understand the protein structure and to design therapies. Obtaining kinetic constants in rate laws for nucleation and…
We develop a multi-scale approach to simulate hydrated nanobio systems under realistic condi- tions (e.g., nanoparticles and protein solutions at physiological conditions over time-scales up to hours). We combine atomistic simulations of…
We study a physical system which, while devoid of the complexity one usually associates with proteins, nevertheless displays a remarkable array of protein-like properties. The constructive hypothesis that this striking resemblance is not…
The growing interest for comparing protein internal dynamics owes much to the realization that protein function can be accompanied or assisted by structural fluctuations and conformational changes. Analogously to the case of functional…
This is my attempt to answer Schr\"odinger's question: "What is Life?". In living cell the local combination of atoms is reproduced with incredible accuracy. In the case of protein biosynthesis the notion of the physical aspect of the…
Biomolecular condensates self-assemble when proteins and nucleic acids spontaneously demix to form droplets within the crowded intracellular milieu. This simple mechanism underlies the formation of a wide variety of membraneless…
Proteins control many vital functions in living cells, such as cell growth and cell division. Reliable coordination of these functions requires the spatial and temporal organizaton of proteins inside cells, which encodes information about…