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Updated: Jul 18, 2026

Thermodynamics of Membrane Protein Folding Measured by Fluorescence Spectroscopy
Published on: April 28, 2011
Modeling protein thermodynamics and fluctuations at the mesoscale
Naoko Nakagawa1, Michel Peyrard
1Department of Mathematical Sciences, Ibaraki University, Mito, Ibaraki 310-8512, Japan.
Abstract:
We use an extended Go model, in unfrustrated and frustrated variants, to study the energy landscape and the fluctuations of a model protein. The model exhibits two transitions, folding and dynamical transitions, when changing the temperature. The inherent structures corresponding to the minima of the landscape are analyzed and we show how their energy density can be obtained from simulations around the folding temperature. The scaling of this energy density is found to reflect the folding transition. Moreover, this approach allows us to build a reduced thermodynamics in the inherent structure landscape. Equilibrium studies, from full molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and from the reduced thermodynamics, detect the features of a dynamical transition at low temperature and we analyze the location and time scale of the fluctuations of the protein, showing the need of some frustration in the model to get realistic results. The frustrated model also shows the presence of a kinetic trap which strongly affects the dynamics of folding.
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