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Protein dynamics and function: Insights from the energy landscape and solvent slaving
Author(s) -
Frauenfelder Hans,
Fenimore Paul W.,
Young Robert D.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
iubmb life
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.132
H-Index - 113
eISSN - 1521-6551
pISSN - 1521-6543
DOI - 10.1080/15216540701194113
Subject(s) - energy landscape , function (biology) , dynamics (music) , solvent , chemistry , molecular dynamics , materials science , biological system , biochemistry , computational chemistry , physics , biology , evolutionary biology , acoustics
Protein motions are complex and a good way to describe them is in terms of a very high‐dimensional conformation space. We give here a simple explanation of the conformation space and the energy landscape, the conformational motions and protein reactions, based on an analogy to a traffic problem. The analogy provides insight into the slaving of protein processes to bulk solvent fluctuations, in both the native and unfolded states.