Computational Biochemistry Special Issue: Bridging Experiments and Molecular Insights

The cell is chemically composed of water, organic molecules and inorganic ions.
Water
The polarity of the water molecule and its resulting hydrogen bonding makes water a unique substance with special properties that are intimately tied to the processes of life. Life originally evolved in an aqueous environment, and most of an organism’s cellular chemistry and metabolism occur inside the aqueous contents of the cell’s cytoplasm. Special properties of water are its high heat capacity and heat of...

Noncovalent attractions are associations within and between molecules that influence the shape and structural stability of complexes. These interactions differ from covalent bonding in that they do not involve sharing of electrons.
Four types of noncovalent interactions are hydrogen bonds, van der Waals forces, ionic bonds, and hydrophobic interactions.
Hydrogen bonding results from the electrostatic attraction of a hydrogen atom covalently bonded to a strong-electronegative atom like oxygen,...

Cooperative allosteric transitions can occur in multimeric proteins, where each subunit of the protein has its own ligand-binding site. When a ligand binds to any of these subunits, it triggers a conformational change that affects the binding sites in the other subunits; this can change the affinity of the other sites for their respective ligands. The ability of the protein to change the shape of its binding site is attributed to the presence of a mix of flexible and stable segments in the...