Hydrodynamic Interactions in Protein Folding

Abstract

We incorporate hydrodynamic interactions (HI) in a coarse-grained and structure-based model of proteins by employing the Rotne-Prager hydrodynamic tensor. We study several small proteins and demonstrate that HI facilitate folding. We also study HIV-1 protease and show that HI make the flap closing dynamics faster. The HI are found to affect time correlation functions in the vicinity of the native state even though they have no impact on same time characteristics of the structure fluctuations around the native state