Basic Protein Folding Processes on Wolfram

Very cool demonstration on how protein folding occurs. You can change the two torsion angles and see how the rest of the molecule moves in concert. From the page:

This Demonstration presents a simplified schematic representation of the possible motions of a protein chain. Two amino-acid units, with side groups  and , are shown. The green cylinders represent the continuation of the protein chain in each direction. The torsional angles R1 and R2 can be independently varied between 0° and 360°. The immense number of possibilities, for just two of the hundreds or thousands of configuration variables, is soon apparent. Remarkably, a linear sequence of amino acids will biologically self-assemble in a matter of milliseconds!

This uses the Wolfram CDF player to display the demonstration so make sure you download that first.

• Login or register to post comments