Protein dynamics and function: insights from the energy landscape and solvent slaving
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Updated: Jul 13, 2026

Unraveling Entropic Rate Acceleration Induced by Solvent Dynamics in Membrane Enzymes
Published on: January 16, 2016
Hans Frauenfelder1, Paul W Fenimore, Robert D Young
1Theory Division, K710, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA. frauenfelder@lanl.gov
Abstract:
Protein motions are complex and a good way to describe them is in terms of a very high-dimensional conformation space. We give here a simple explanation of the conformation space and the energy landscape, the conformational motions and protein reactions, based on an analogy to a traffic problem. The analogy provides insight into the slaving of protein processes to bulk solvent fluctuations, in both the native and unfolded states.
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