Experimental studies have demonstrated that many small, single-domain proteins fold via simple two-state kinetics. We present a first principles approach for predicting these experimentally determined folding rates. Our approach is based on a nucleation-condensation folding mechanism, where the rate-limiting step is a random, diffusive search for the native tertiary topology. To estimate the ra...

In the past decade, when compared to models describing the folding rates of two-state proteins, models describing the folding mechanism of three-state proteins remain quite limited due to the complexity present in the folding mechanism and lack in their experimental data. In the present work, rate-limiting long-range contacts were classified into various bins based on sequence separation distan...

Trigger factor and DnaK protect nascent protein chains from misfolding and aggregation in the E. coli cytosol, but how these chaperones affect the mechanism of de novo protein folding is not yet understood. Upon expression under chaperone-depleted conditions, multidomain proteins such as bacterial beta-galactosidase (beta-gal) and eukaryotic luciferase fold by a rapid but inefficient default pa...

Peptide-recognition modules (PRMs) are used throughout biology to mediate protein-protein interactions, and many PRMs are members of large protein domain families. Recent genome-wide measurements describe networks of peptide-PRM interactions. In these networks, very similar PRMs recognize distinct sets of peptides, raising the question of how peptide-recognition specificity is achieved using si...

A quantum theory on conformation-electron system is presented. Protein folding is regarded as the quantum transition between torsion states on polypeptide chain, and the folding rate is calculated by nonadiabatic operator method. The theory is used to study the temperature dependences of folding rate of 15 proteins and their non-Arrhenius behavior can all be deduced in a natural way. A general ...

homologous immunoglobulin-like β-sandwich proteins Running title: Energetic frustrations in β-sandwich proteins Abstract Nonnative residual interactions have attracted increasing attention in recent protein folding researches. Experimental and theoretical investigations had been set out to catch nonnative contacts that might dominate key events in protein folding. However, energetic frustration...

Cytochrome-c (cyt-c) is an electron transport protein, and it is present throughout the evolution. More than 280 sequences have been reported in the protein sequence database (www.uniprot.org). Though sequentially diverse, cyt-c has essentially retained its tertiary structure or fold. Thus a vast data set of varied sequences with retention of similar structure and fun...

Most protein domains fold in an apparently co-operative and two-state manner with only the native and denatured states significantly populated at any experimental condition. However, the protein folding energy landscape is often rugged and different transition states may be rate limiting for the folding reaction under different conditions, as seen for the PDZ protein domain family. We have here...

How RNA sequences fold to specific tertiary structures is one of the key problems for understanding their dynamics and functions. Here, we study the folding process of an H-type RNA pseudoknot by performing a large-scale all-atom MD simulation and bias-exchange metadynamics. The folding free energy landscapes are obtained and several folding intermediates are identified. It is suggested that th...