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All-or-none proteinlike folding transition of a flexible homopolymer chain
Mark P Taylor1, Wolfgang Paul, Kurt Binder
1Department of Physics, Hiram College, Hiram, Ohio 44234, USA.
Abstract:
Here we report a first-order all-or-none transition from an expanded coil to a compact crystallite for a flexible polymer chain. Wang-Landau sampling is used to construct the complete density of states for square-well chains up to length 256. Analysis within both the microcanonical and canonical ensembles shows a direct freezing transition for finite length chains with sufficiently short-range interactions. This type of transition is a distinctive feature of "one-step" protein folding and our findings demonstrate that a simple homopolymer model can exhibit protein-folding thermodynamics.
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