| AAPPS Bulletin Vol.13 No.2 April 2003 |
Articles
DNA, RNA, and Protein Folding (PDF,952KB)
Henri Orland,CE-Saclay, CEA, France
abstract---
Statistical Physics has found numerous applications in biological sciences, both in Molecular and in Cellular Biology. The applications include fields as diverse as protein and RNA folding and dynamics, DNA melting, single molecule experiments, motor proteins, sequence alignment, DNA arrays, evolution, population dynamics, biological networks, etc.
The study of the conformational and dynamical properties of biopolymers has been one of my fields of research in the last decade. Biopolymers are the molecules of life: In the cell, they store the genetic information (DNA), transport it (RNA), or are the essential actors of the actual biochemistry that takes place (proteins). The biological activity of these molecules is directly related to their 3-dimensional structure, which is generally unique, and totally determined by the chemical sequence of the molecule. At this stage, I will outline some of the problems which I have discussed in my lectures at the first Winter School on Modern Biophysics held in Taipei.
These problems are still open and offer an important challenge to statistical physicists |
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