Modeling loop entropy

Proteins fold from a highly disordered state into a highly ordered one. Traditionally, the folding problem has been stated as one of predicting "the" tertiary structure from sequential information. However, new evidence suggests that the ensemble of unfolded forms may not be as disordered as once believed, and that the native form of many proteins may not be described by a single conformation, but rather an ensemble of its own. Quantifying the relative disorder in the folded and unfolded ensembles as an entropy difference may therefore shed light on the folding process. One issue that clouds discussions of "entropy" is that many different kinds of entropy can be defined: entropy associated with overall translational and rotational Brownian motion, configurational entropy, vibrational entropy, conformational entropy computed in internal or Cartesian coordinates (which can even be different from each other), conformational entropy computed on a lattice, each of the above with different solvation and solvent models, thermodynamic entropy measured experimentally, etc. The focus of this work is the conformational entropy of coil/loop regions in proteins. New mathematical modeling tools for the approximation of changes in conformational entropy during transition from unfolded to folded ensembles are introduced. In particular, models for computing lower and upper bounds on entropy for polymer models of polypeptide coils both with and without end constraints are presented. The methods reviewed here include kinematics (the mathematics of rigid-body motions), classical statistical mechanics, and information theory.