432 research outputs found
Elastic properties of proteins: insight on the folding process and evolutionary selection of native structures
We carry out a theoretical study of the vibrational and relaxation properties
of naturally-occurring proteins with the purpose of characterizing both the
folding and equilibrium thermodynamics. By means of a suitable model we provide
a full characterization of the spectrum and eigenmodes of vibration at various
temperatures by merely exploiting the knowledge of the protein native
structure. It is shown that the rate at which perturbations decay at the
folding transition correlates well with experimental folding rates. This
validation is carried out on a list of about 30 two-state folders. Furthermore,
the qualitative analysis of residues mean square displacements (shown to
accurately reproduce crystallographic data) provides a reliable and
statistically accurate method to identify crucial folding sites/contacts. This
novel strategy is validated against clinical data for HIV-1 Protease. Finally,
we compare the spectra and eigenmodes of vibration of natural proteins against
randomly-generated compact structures and regular random graphs. The comparison
reveals a distinctive enhanced flexibility of natural structures accompanied by
slow relaxation times at the folding temperature. The fact that these
properties are intimately connected to the presence and assembly of secondary
motifs hints at the special criteria adopted by evolution in the selection of
viable folds.Comment: Revtex 17 pages, 13 eps figure
A Nonlinear Filter for Markov Chains and its Effect on Diffusion Maps
Diffusion maps are a modern mathematical tool that helps to find structure in large data sets - we present a new filtering technique that is based on the assumption that errors in the data are intrinsically random to isolate and filter errors and thus boost the efficiency of diffusion maps. Applications include data sets from medicine (the Cleveland Heart Disease Data set and the Wisconsin Breast Cancer Data set) and engineering (the Ionosphere data set)
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