Protein's unfolding and the glass transition: a common thermodynamic signature

摘要

Recently, it has been recognized that protein's folding and unfolding mechanisms exhibit a wide range of common features with the glass transition observed in supercooled organic and inorganic liquids. Such similarities range from pure thermodynamic aspects such an anomalous Cp and a substantial entropy decrease S<0, to strictly kinetic aspects as the existence of an excess of vibrational modes at low frequencies (bosonic peak) revealed by Raman and neutron scattering experiments. In this work, we discuss both the experimental and theoretical facts that might enable an extrapolation of the Adam-Gibbs scheme for the standard glass transition to describe the relaxation time as function of temperature T in biological macromolecules' unfolding.