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Nearly a quarter of genomic sequences and almost half of all receptors that are likely to be targets for drug design are integral membrane proteins. Understanding the detailed mechanisms of the folding of membrane proteins is a largely unsolved, key problem in structural biology. Here, we introduce a general model and use computer simulations to study the equilibrium properties and the folding kinetics of a $C_{alpha}$-based two helix bundle fragment (comprised of 66 amino-acids) of Bacteriorhodopsin. Various intermediates are identified and their free energy are calculated toghether with the free energy barrier between them. In 40% of folding trajectories, the folding rate is considerably increased by the presence of non-obligatory intermediates acting as traps. In all cases, a substantial portion of the helices is rapidly formed. This initial stage is followed by a long period of consolidation of the helices accompanied by their correct packing within the membrane. Our results provide the framework for understanding the variety of folding pathways of helical transmembrane proteins.
Protein aggregation in cell membrane is vital for the majority of biological functions. Recent experimental results suggest that transmembrane domains of proteins such as $alpha$-helices and $beta$-sheets have different structural rigidities. We use
The free energy of globular protein chain is considered to be a functional defined on smooth curves in three dimensional Euclidean space. From the requirement of geometrical invariance, together with basic facts on conformation of helical proteins an
We have investigated the relaxational dynamics for a protein model at various temperatures. Theoretical analysis of this model in conjunction with numerical simulations suggests several relaxation regimes, including a single exponential, a power law
We carry out a coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulation of phospholipid vesicles with transmembrane proteins. We measure the mean and Gaussian curvatures of our protein-embedded vesicles and quantitatively show how protein clusters change the sha
We construct a minimalist model of RNA secondary-structure formation and use it to study the mapping from sequence to structure. There are strong, qualitative differences between two-letter and four or six-letter alphabets. With only two kinds of bas