(pdf poster 200 kb, pdf slides 600 kb Mb)

Speaker: Leonor Cruzeiro
Universidade do Algarbe, Faro, Portugal.

Date and premises: Thurdsday, May 24, 2007, 18.30h. Lecture Hall, Physics Faculty, Avda Reina Mercedes s/n, Sevilla
Language: English

Abstract:

Proteins are machines of life, because they are involved in most of the processes that occur in living cells. For functioning, they must first acquire a well-defined tridimensional structure, known as native structure. A crucial problem in biology is protein folding, which consists of knowing how a given sequence of aminoacids acquires finally the native structure. This talk will present evidence that, for the same aminoacids sequence, proteins can have many different structures with the same energy as the native one, all of them within the same thermodynamic conditions. This means that the native structure is not obtained by means of the thermodynamic principle of minimum energy. Then, how do the protein fold? The answer is that deterministic forces select the native structure. The Davydov-Scott model suggests that these deterministic forces come from excited vibrational states.