Regensburg 2007 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 4: Protein Structure and Folding
BP 4.4: Vortrag
Montag, 26. März 2007, 18:15–18:30, H43
Analyzing knots in protein structures — •Virnau Peter1, Mirny Leonid2, and Kardar Mehran3 — 1Uni Mainz — 2Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology — 3Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Physics
Although globular homopolymers display an abundance of knots (Virnau et al, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 127, 15102 (2005)), only about one in a thousand protein structures are knotted. Can this absence of entanglement be explained in terms of statistical mechanics or is there an evolutionary bias? Do knots in proteins serve a purpose and how do they actually fold? To elaborate on this, we will present an overview of knotted proteins from the current version of the Protein Data Bank (Virnau et al, PLOS Comp Biol 2, e122 (2006)). We will also discuss some particularly intriguing examples of this set and the evolutionary context in which knots appear.