Dihedral-angle Gaussian distribution driving protein folding

P.H. Figueirêdo, M.A. Moret, E. Nogueira and S. Coutinho

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2008, vol. 387, issue 8, 2019-2024

Abstract: The proposal of this paper is to provide a simple angular random-walk model to build up polypeptide structures, which encompass properties of dihedral angles of folded proteins. From this model, structures will be built with lengths ranging from 125 up to 400 amino acids for the different fractions of secondary structure motifs, in which dihedral angles were randomly chosen according to narrow Gaussian probability distributions. In order to measure the fractal dimension of proteins three different cases were analyzed. The first contained α-helix structures only, the second β-strands structures and the third a mix of α-helices and β-sheets. The behavior of proteins with α-helix motifs are more compact than in other situations. The findings herein indicate that this model describes some structural properties of a protein and suggest that randomness is an essential ingredient but proteins are driven by narrow angular Gaussian probability distributions and not by random-walk processes.

Keywords: Protein structure; Angular Gaussian-walk; Radius of gyration; Mass fractal exponent (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437107012599
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:387:y:2008:i:8:p:2019-2024

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2007.11.034

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().