70 research outputs found
Capturing the essence of folding and functions of biomolecules using Coarse-Grained Models
The distances over which biological molecules and their complexes can
function range from a few nanometres, in the case of folded structures, to
millimetres, for example during chromosome organization. Describing phenomena
that cover such diverse length, and also time scales, requires models that
capture the underlying physics for the particular length scale of interest.
Theoretical ideas, in particular, concepts from polymer physics, have guided
the development of coarse-grained models to study folding of DNA, RNA, and
proteins. More recently, such models and their variants have been applied to
the functions of biological nanomachines. Simulations using coarse-grained
models are now poised to address a wide range of problems in biology.Comment: 37 pages, 8 figure
Reactive molecular dynamics: From small molecules to proteins
The current status of reactive molecular dynamics (MD) simulations is summarized. Both, methodological aspects and applications to problems ranging from gas phase reaction dynamics to ligand-binding in solvated proteins are discussed, focusing on extracting information from simulations that cannot easily be obtained from experiments alone. One specific example is the structural interpretation of the ligand rebinding time scales extracted from state-of-the art time-resolved experiments. Atomistic simulations employing validated reactive interaction potentials are capable of providing structural information about the time scales involved. Both, merits and shortcomings of the various methods are discussed and the outlook summarizes possible future avenues such as reactive potentials based on machine learning techniques
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