IMR Press / FBL / Volume 13 / Issue 12 / DOI: 10.2741/3039

Frontiers in Bioscience-Landmark (FBL) is published by IMR Press from Volume 26 Issue 5 (2021). Previous articles were published by another publisher on a subscription basis, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement with Frontiers in Bioscience.

Article
Probing protein aggregation using discrete molecular dynamics
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1 Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599, USA

*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

 

Front. Biosci. (Landmark Ed) 2008, 13(12), 4795–4808; https://doi.org/10.2741/3039
Published: 1 May 2008
Abstract

Understanding the role of biomolecular dynamics in cellular processes leading to human diseases and the ability to rationally manipulate these processes is of fundamental importance in scientific research. The last decade has witnessed significant progress in probing biophysical behavior of proteins. However, we are still limited in understanding how changes in protein dynamics and inter-protein interactions occurring in short length- and time- scales lead to aberrations in their biological function. Bridging this gap in biology probed using computer simulations marks a challenging frontier in computational biology. Here we examine hypothesis-driven simplified protein models in conjunction with discrete molecular dynamics in the study protein aggregation, implicated in series of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's diseases. Discrete molecular dynamics simulations of simplified protein models have emerged as a powerful methodology with its ability to bridge the gap in time and length scales from protein dynamics to aggregation, and provide an indispensable tool for probing protein aggregation.

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