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Introduction to the Protein Folding Problem: An Approach Using Simplified Computational Models

Abstract

This work aims to introduce students of physics and related areas to the problem of protein folding. Proteins are biological macromolecules of great importance to living things. The understanding of how this macromolecule finds a three-dimensional and functional structure, using the information present in a linear sequence of different amino acids, is a relevant question which involves researchers from different areas of knowledge. This work discusses the importance and the main properties of proteins and presents a brief history of protein folding studies and how these works converge to the Energy Landscape theory. There are described some theoretical and computational models from analytical approaches to the development of the Structure-Based Models for simulations. Here it is also presented and discussed some expected results for each used model.

Keywords:
Protein Folding; Energy Landscape; Structure-Based Models; Lattice Model; Biophysics

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