SELF-SIMILARITY OF PROTEIN FOLDING FLOWS

The problem of how a protein folds into its functional (native) state is one of the central problems of molecular biology, which attracts the attention of researchers from biology, physics and chemistry for many years. Of particular interest are general properties of the folding process, because the mechanisms of folding of different proteins can be essentially different. Previously, in the study of folding of fyn SH3 domain, we found that despite all the diversity and complexity of individual folding trajectories, the folding flows possess a well pronounced property of self-similarity, with a fractal character of the flow distributions. In the present paper, we study this phenomenon for another protein – beta3s, which is essentially different from the SH3 domain in its structure and folding kinetics. Also, in contrast to the fyn SH3 domain, for which a coarse-grained representation was used, we perform simulations on the atomic level of resolution. We show that the self-similarity and fractality of folding flows are observed is this case too, which suggests that these properties are characteristic of the protein folding dynamics.

Keywords:
protein folding dynamics, simulation, folding flows, self-similarity, fractality. 
УДК 577.32; 532.5

SELF-SIMILARITY OF PROTEIN FOLDING FLOWS