title: Long-range energy transfer in proteins.
abstract: Proteins are large and complex molecular machines. In order to perform their function, most of them need energy, e.g. either in the form of a photon, as in the case of the visual pigment rhodopsin, or through the breaking of a chemical bond, as in the presence of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Such energy, in turn, has to be transmitted to specific locations, often several tens of A away from where it is initially released. Here we show, within the framework of a coarse-grained nonlinear network model, that energy in a protein can jump from site to site with high yields, covering in many instances remarkably large distances. Following single-site excitations, few specific sites are targeted, systematically within the stiffest regions. Such energy transfers mark the spontaneous formation of a localized mode of nonlinear origin at the destination site, which acts as an efficient energy-accumulating center. Interestingly, yields are found to be optimum for excitation energies in the range of biologically relevant ones.
authors.affiliation: Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Laboratoire de Biophysique Statistique, ITP-SB, BSP-720, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland. francesco.piazza@epfl.ch
authors.forename: Francesco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Piazza
authors.forename: Yves-Henri
authors.initials: YH
authors.lastname: Sanejouand
mesh_terms: D004735:Energy Transfer; D008954:Models, Biological; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics; D011506:Proteins / Q000378:metabolism*
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins