Phase diagram of a semiflexible polymer chain in a θ solvent: Application to protein folding

摘要: We consider a lattice model of semiflexible homopolymer chain in bad solvent. Beside the temperature T, this is described by (i) curvature energy eh, representing stiffness chain; (ii) nearest‐neighbor attractive ev, solvent; and (iii) monomer density ρ=N/Ω, where N Ω denote, respectively, number monomers sites. This simplified view protein folding problem, which encompasses geometrical competition between secondary structures (the term modelling helix formation) global compactness (modeled here energy), but contains no side information. By allowing ρ to depart from unity one has made first (albeit naive) step include role water. In previous analytical studies, we considered only (fully compact) case ρ=1, found order freezing transition towards crystalline ground state (also called native in...