All-or-none proteinlike folding transition of a flexible homopolymer chain

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2009 May;79(5 Pt 1):050801. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.79.050801. Epub 2009 May 7.

Abstract

Here we report a first-order all-or-none transition from an expanded coil to a compact crystallite for a flexible polymer chain. Wang-Landau sampling is used to construct the complete density of states for square-well chains up to length 256. Analysis within both the microcanonical and canonical ensembles shows a direct freezing transition for finite length chains with sufficiently short-range interactions. This type of transition is a distinctive feature of "one-step" protein folding and our findings demonstrate that a simple homopolymer model can exhibit protein-folding thermodynamics.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.