Department of Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
Biochem Cell Biol. 2010 Apr;88(2):359-69. doi: 10.1139/o09-187.
Water permeates all life, and mediates forces that are essential to the process of macromolecular self-assembly. Predicting these forces in a given biological context is challenging, since water organizes itself differently next to charged and hydrophobic surfaces, both of which are typically at play on the nanoscale in vivo. In this work, we present a simple statistical mechanical model for the forces water mediates between different confining surfaces, and demonstrate that the model qualitatively unifies a wide range of phenomena known in the simulation literature, including several cases of protein folding under confinement.
水渗透于所有生命之中，并介导着对大分子自组装过程至关重要的力。在给定的生物环境中预测这些力具有挑战性，因为水在带电和疏水面附近的组织方式不同，而这两者在体内的纳米尺度上通常都在发挥作用。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个简单的统计力学模型，用于描述不同约束表面之间水介导的力，并且证明该模型定性地统一了模拟文献中已知的广泛现象，包括几种在约束下的蛋白质折叠情况。
