Caraglio M, Imparato A
Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Sezione INFN, Università di Padova, Via Marzolo 8, I-35131 Padova, Italy.
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Aarhus, Ny Munkegade, Building 1520, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2014 Dec;90(6):062712. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.90.062712. Epub 2014 Dec 19.
Protein machines often exhibit long-range interplay between different sites in order to achieve their biological tasks. We investigate and characterize the nonlinear energy localization and the basic mechanisms of energy transfer in protein devices. By studying two different model protein machines, with different biological functions, we show that genuinely nonlinear phenomena are responsible for energy transport between the different machine sites involved in the biological functions. The energy transfer turns out to be extremely efficient from an energetic point of view: by changing the energy initially provided to the model device, we identify a well defined range of energies where the time for the energy transport to occur is minimal and the amount of transferred energy is a maximum. Furthermore, by introducing an implicit solvent, we show that the energy is localized on the internal residues of the protein structure, thus minimizing the dissipation.
蛋白质机器常常在不同位点之间展现出远程相互作用，以完成其生物学任务。我们研究并表征了蛋白质装置中的非线性能量局域化以及能量转移的基本机制。通过研究具有不同生物学功能的两种不同模型蛋白质机器，我们表明真正的非线性现象是生物功能中不同机器位点之间能量传输的原因。从能量角度来看，能量转移极其高效：通过改变最初提供给模型装置的能量，我们确定了一个明确的能量范围，在这个范围内能量传输发生的时间最短且转移的能量量最大。此外，通过引入隐式溶剂，我们表明能量定域在蛋白质结构的内部残基上，从而使耗散最小化。
