Related papers: Substructural cooperativity and parallel versus se…
Mechanical stretching of secondary structures is studied through molecular dynamics simulations of a Go-like model. Force vs. displacement curves are studied as a function of the stiffness and velocity of the pulling device. The succession…
Thermal unfolding of proteins is compared to folding and mechanical stretching in a simple topology-based dynamical model. We define the unfolding time and demonstrate its low-temperature divergence. Below a characteristic temperature,…
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…
Protein structure prediction and folding are fundamental to understanding biology, with recent deep learning advances reshaping the field. Diffusion-based generative models have revolutionized protein design, enabling the creation of novel…
We propose a protein model based on a hierarchy of constraints that force the protein to follow certain pathways when changing conformation. The model exhibits a first order phase transition, cooperativity and is exactly solvable. It also…
The conformational dynamics of a single protein molecule in a shear flow is investigated using Brownian dynamics simulations. A structure-based coarse grained model of a protein is used. We consider two proteins, ubiquitin and integrin, and…
Deviations from linearity in the dependence of the logarithm of protein unfolding rates, $\log k_u(f)$, as a function of mechanical force, $f$, measurable in single molecule experiments, can arise for many reasons. In particular, upward…
Protein folding, peptide aggregation and crystallization, as well as adsorption of molecules on soft or solid substrates have an essential feature in common: In all these processes, structure formation is guided by a collective, cooperative…
The thermodynamics of proteins indicate that folding/unfolding takes place either through stable intermediates or through a two-state process without intermediates. The rather short folding times of the two-state process indicate that…
The energy for protein folding arises from multiple sources and is not large in total. In spite of the many specific successes of energy landscape and other approaches, there still seems to be some missing guiding factor that explains how…
Mapping between sequence and structure is currently an open problem in structural biology. Despite many experimental and computational efforts it is not clear yet how the structure is encoded in the sequence. Answering this question may…
Two-state cooperativity is an important characteristic in protein folding. It is defined by a depletion of states lying energetically between folded and unfolded conformations. While there are different ways to test for two-state…
A theoretical analysis of the unfolding pathway of simple modular proteins in length- controlled pulling experiments is put forward. Within this framework, we predict the first module to unfold in a chain of identical units, emphasizing the…
By observing trends in the folding kinetics of experimental 2-state proteins at their transition midpoints, and by observing trends in the barrier heights of numerous simulations of coarse grained, C-alpha model, Go proteins, we show that…
The effects of cooperativity are studied within Go-Lennard-Jones models of proteins by making the contact interactions dependent on the proximity to the native conformation. The kinetic universality classes are found to remain the same as…
Exploring and understanding the protein-folding problem has been a long-standing challenge in molecular biology. Here, using molecular dynamics simulation, we reveal how parallel distributed adjacent planar peptide groups of unfolded…
Cytoskeletal motors known as motor proteins are molecules that drive cellular transport along several parallel cytoskeletal filaments and support many biological processes. Experimental evidences suggest that they interact with the nearest…
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…
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…
Using a structure-based coarse-grained model of proteins, we study the mechanism of unfolding of knotted proteins through heating. We find that the dominant mechanisms of unfolding depend on the temperature applied and are generally…