Biophysics of protein evolution and evolutionary protein biophysics.

ABSTRACT: The study of molecular evolution at the level of protein-coding genes often entails comparing large datasets of sequences to infer their evolutionary relationships. Despite the importance of a protein's structure and conformational dynamics to its function and thus its fitness, common phylogenetic methods embody minimal biophysical knowledge of proteins. To underscore the biophysical constraints on natural selection, we survey effects of protein mutations, highlighting the physical basis for marginal stability of natural globular proteins and how requirement for kinetic stability and avoidance of misfolding and misinteractions might have affected protein evolution. The biophysical underpinnings of these effects have been addressed by models with an explicit coarse-grained spatial represent

SUBMITTER: Sikosek T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4191086 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature