SP Seminar @SISSA Via Bonomea 265, Tuesday 19 December at 11:00 a.m. - M. BAIESI

[CM Section]

Joint ICTP/SISSA Statistical Physics Seminar

Tuesday 19 December at 11:00 a.m.
Venue: SISSA, Via Bonomea 265, room 128
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Speaker:
Marco BAIESI (Dept. of Physics & Astronomy 'Galileo Galilei', Univ. of 
Padova)

Title:
Entanglement in Protein Native States

Abstract:
Since a few years it has become clear that it is possible to apply 
topological methods to
characterize the structure of proteins. For instance, knots and 
“lasso” structures were
found in several proteins. Here we focus on the linking number 
quantifying the degree of
entanglement between two loops, which may be easily generalized to 
estimate the
entanglement between two open curves such as protein backbones. With 
this scheme
we find a high degree of interwinding between proteins forming 
domain-swapped dimers.
In the same way, one may estimate the maximum degree of entanglement 
within subchains
of a single protein backbone to find that it strongly anti-correlates 
with that protein folding
rate. This introduces a novel characterization of proteins that 
complements other methods
extracting information from their tertiary structure.