Construction of Protein Tertiary Structures Using a Hierarchical Approach (2000)
| Venue: | J. Mol. Biol |
BibTeX
@ARTICLE{Xia00constructionof,
author = {Yu Xia and Enoch S. Huang and Michael Levitt and Ram Samudrala},
title = {Construction of Protein Tertiary Structures Using a Hierarchical Approach},
journal = {J. Mol. Biol},
year = {2000},
volume = {300},
pages = {171--185}
}
OpenURL
Abstract
Ab initio protein structure prediction remains one of the most important unsolved problems in molecular biophysics after 30 years of intensive research. This problem is in principle solvable: if we know the exact formulation of the physical micro-environment within a cell where proteins fold, we will be able to mimic the folding process in nature by computing the molecular dynamics based on our knowledge of the physical laws (McCarmmon & Harvey, 1987; van Gunsteren, 1998; Duan & Kollman, 1998). Complementarily, we can rely on the much-debated thermodynamic hypothesis, i.e. that the native protein structure is thermodynamically stable and is located at the global free energy minimum (Annsen, 1973). However, we do not yet have a complete understanding of the driving forces behind protein folding. Perturbations introduced by errors in the potential energy landscape may possibly result in a different folding pathway and a different folded structure. Even if we have an accurat...







