Detailed mechanisms of DNA clamps in prokaryotic and eukaryotic systems were investigated by probing their mechanics with single-molecule force spectroscopy. Specifically, the mechanical forces required for the Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae clamp opening were measured at the single-molecule level by optical tweezers. Steered molecular dynamics simulations further examined the fo...

Single-molecule force spectroscopy studies and steered molecular dynamics simulations have revealed that protein topology and pulling geometry play important roles in determining the mechanical stability of proteins. Most studies have focused on local interactions that are associated with the force-bearing beta-strands. Interactions mediated by neighboring strands are often overlooked. Here we ...

The surrogate process approximation (SPA) is applied to model the nonequilibrium dynamics of a reaction coordinate (RC) associated with the unfolding and refolding processes of a deca-alanine peptide at 300 K. The RC dynamics, which correspond to the evolution of the end-to-end distance of the polypeptide, are produced by steered molecular dynamics (SMD) simulations and approximated using overd...

Steered molecular dynamics, SMD, [S. Park and K. Schulten, J. Chem. Phys. 120, 5946 (2004)] combined with Jarzynski's equality has been used widely in generating free energy profiles for various biological problems, e.g., protein folding and ligand binding. However, the calculated averages are generally dominated by "rare events" from the ensemble of nonequilibrium trajectories. The recently pr...

Recently developed DNA-based analogues of membrane proteins have advanced synthetic biology. A fundamental question is how hydrophilic nanostructures reside in the hydrophobic environment of the membrane. Here, we use multiscale molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to explore the structure, stability and dynamics of an archetypical DNA nanotube inserted via a ring of membrane anchors into a phos...

Molecular recognition and mechanical properties of proteins govern molecular processes in the cell that can cause disease and can be targeted for drug design. Single molecule measurement techniques have greatly advanced knowledge but cannot resolve enough detail to be interpreted in terms of protein structure. We seek to complement the observations through so-called Steered Molecular Dynamics (...

based on the fact the manipulation of fine nanoclusters calls for more precise modeling, the aim of this paper is to conduct an atomistic investigation for interaction analysis of particle-substrate system for pushing and positioning purposes. in the present research, 2d molecular dynamics simulations have been used to investigate such behaviors. performing the planar simulations can provide a ...