title: Biasing effects of receptor-ligand complexes on protein-unfolding statistics.
abstract: Protein receptor-ligand pairs are increasingly used as specific molecular handles in single-molecule protein-unfolding experiments. Further, known marker domains, also referred to as fingerprints, provide unique unfolding signatures to identify specific single-molecule interactions, when receptor-ligand pairs themselves are investigated. We show here that in cases where there is an overlap between the probability distribution associated with fingerprint domain unfolding and that associated with receptor-ligand dissociation, the experimentally measured force distributions are mutually biased. This biasing effect masks the true parameters of the underlying free energy landscape. To address this, we present a model-free theoretical framework that corrects for the biasing effect caused by such overlapping distributions.
authors.affiliation: Lehrstuhl für Angewandte Physik and Center for Nanoscience, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Amalienstr. 54, 80799 Munich, Germany.
authors.forename: Constantin
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Schoeler
authors.affiliation: Lehrstuhl für Angewandte Physik and Center for Nanoscience, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Amalienstr. 54, 80799 Munich, Germany.
authors.forename: Tobias
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Verdorfer
authors.affiliation: Lehrstuhl für Angewandte Physik and Center for Nanoscience, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Amalienstr. 54, 80799 Munich, Germany.
authors.forename: Hermann E
authors.initials: HE
authors.lastname: Gaub
authors.affiliation: Lehrstuhl für Angewandte Physik and Center for Nanoscience, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Amalienstr. 54, 80799 Munich, Germany.|Department of Chemistry, University of Basel, Klingelbergstrasse 80, 4056 Basel, Switzerland.|Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH-Zürich), 4058 Basel, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Michael A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Nash
mesh_terms: D008024:Ligands; D015233:Models, Statistical; D017510:Protein Folding; D058767:Protein Unfolding; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry*
chemical_list: D008024:Ligands; D011506:Proteins