All-or-none proteinlike folding transition of a flexible homopolymer chain.
Here we report a first-order all-or-none transition from an expanded coil to a compact crystallite for a flexible polymer chain. Wang-Landau sampling is used to construct the complete density of states for square-well chains up to length 256. Analysis within both the microcanonical and canonical ensembles shows a direct freezing transition for finite length chains with sufficiently short-range interactions. This type of transition is a distinctive feature of "one-step" protein folding and our findings demonstrate that a simple homopolymer model can exhibit protein-folding thermodynamics.
Taylor
Mark P
MP
Department of Physics, Hiram College, Hiram, Ohio 44234, USA.
Paul
Wolfgang
W
Binder
Kurt
K