Regensburg 2004 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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AKB: Biologische Physik

AKB 40: Evolution and Complex Systems

AKB 40.4: Hauptvortrag

Donnerstag, 11. März 2004, 16:00–16:30, H40

Proteins: Structure, Function, and Evolution — •Markus Porto¹, Ugo Bastolla², H. Eduardo Roman³, and Michele Vendruscolo⁴ — ¹Institut für Theoretische Physik, Technische Universität Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Germany — ²Centro de Astrobiología (INTA-CSIC), 28850 Torrejon de Ardoz, Spain — ³Dipartimento di Fisica and INFN, Università di Milano, Via Celoria 16, 20133 Milano, Italy — ⁴Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, Lensfield Road, Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK

In my talk I will discuss very recent theoretical work related to the evolution of proteins. The starting point is to understand the statistical properties of neutral evolution of protein sequences under the requirement that the native state remains thermodynamically stable. As a first result, such study yields the rigidity profile (the amount of local conservation) of a given protein fold, which indicates structural and functional important places. The second central result is the observation of strongly correlated fluctuations in the substitution rate and the resulting lack of self-averaging for certain observables, which is important for instance for bioinformatics applications. Thirdly, a relation between sequence based quantities and protein structure is established, which might provide a different route to protein structure prediction.