Protein Folding Problem: From a Chemical Physics Point of View

 

Recent advancements in spectroscopic methods and various physical and chemical tools over the last few years, have made it possible to probe complex biological systems at the single molecule level with a high spatial and temporal resolution.  The results obtained from these studies have made our understanding clearer and also helped us to ask questions on the microscopic details of these system’s structure-function relationships. In this talk, I am going to briefly discuss the underlying physics and theoretical models of a few interesting problems of single molecule protein folding studies. The focus of the talk will be on the development of some analytically tractable models of various phenomena, energetics, spatial conformations, and chemical reactivity of these systems which undergo fluctuations that can be characterized experimentally in terms of time correlation functions, survival probabilities, mean first passage times, and related statistical parameters. The theoretical results obtained here have been shown to agree qualitatively or quantitatively with a range of experimental data. This discussion will partially give an overview of the theoretical methods and techniques that I use in my research to analyze various biophysical problems.

References:
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