Coarse Grained Modeling and Approaches to Protein Folding

摘要

The theoretical prediction of protein structures has become a field of increasing importance in both biology andnphysics. Reliable prediction methods in fact, would spare time consuming experimental X-ray and NMR techniques andnthey would represent a challenge for computational protein modeling as well. The well known limitations of all-atomnmodels call for the development of coarse-grained protein descriptions including a minimal number of protein-like features,nwhile being capable of mimicking the essence of protein folding mechanisms. In this paper we review the most importantnclasses of coarse-grained protein models in order of increasing complexity, starting from (over simplified) binarynmodels, to models with one or two reaction centers per residue. We discuss how, despite their simplification, coarsegrainednmodels constitute a viable approach to structure prediction and they shed light on many aspects of protein-foldingnproblem.