First-order coil-globule transition driven by vibrational entropy

Carlo Maffi, Marco Baiesi, Lapo Casetti, Francesco Piazza and Paolo De Los Rios ()
Additional contact information
Carlo Maffi: Laboratory of Statistical Biophysics, SB ITP, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Marco Baiesi: Università di Padova, and INFN
Lapo Casetti: Università di Firenze and Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Sezione di Firenze, via G. Sansone 1, Sesto Fiorentino (FI) I-50019, Italy.
Francesco Piazza: University of Orléans and Centre de Biophysique Moléculaire
Paolo De Los Rios: Laboratory of Statistical Biophysics, SB ITP, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Nature Communications, 2012, vol. 3, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract By shifting the balance between conformational entropy and internal energy, polymers modify their shape under external stimuli, such as changes in temperature. Prominent among such transformations is the coil-globule transition, whereby a polymer can switch from an entropy-dominated coil conformation to a globular one, governed by energy. The nature of the coil-globule transition has remained elusive, with evidence for both continuous and discontinuous transitions, with the two-state behaviour of proteins as an instance of the latter. Theoretical models mostly predict second-order transitions. Here we introduce a model that takes into consideration hitherto neglected features common to any polymer. We show that a first-order phase transition smoothly appears as a function of the model parameters. Our results can relieve part of the conflicts between theory and experiments in the field of protein folding, in the wake of recent studies tracing back the remarkable properties of proteins to basic polymer physics.

Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2055 Abstract (text/html)

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:nat:natcom:v:3:y:2012:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms2055

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2055

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().