|
Physical Society Colloquium
Eldon Emberly NEC Research Institute Proteins and RNA are two fundamental polymers that nature uses for functional and structural purposes. Both are sequences of specific monomers that fold into well defined structures. Nature uses a surprisingly small number of structures, despite the overwhelmingly large set of potential sequences. Has nature found all possible folded structures? In the talk, I address this question using the notion of designability: namely, that some few structures are intrinsically more stable than the rest. I present a method for generating realistic off-lattice protein structures to assess the completeness of the set of natural structures, and to facilitate the search for new, highly designable folds. Lastly, the application of designability to RNA structures will be considered.
Tuesday, January 22nd 2002, 11:00 |