Program

P.27 -- Poster, NCTP-42

Date: Tuesday, 1 August 2017

Time: 16h00 - 17h30

Effects of macromolecular crowding on the escape of nascent proteins from the ribosomal tunnel

Bui Phuong Thuy (1) and Trinh Xuan Hoang (2)

(1) Nam Dinh University of Technology Education, Nam Dinh, Vietnam (2) Institute of Physics, Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam

After being fully synthesized, nascent proteins must travel through the ribosomal exit tunnel before entering an environment crowded by other proteins and molecules. Both the confinement of the tunnel and the crowding of the intracell environment are known to significantly alter protein folding behaviors, but they are often considered separately in theoretical and simulation studies. In this work, by using coarse-grained models with Langevin dynamics, we simulate the folding and escape of nascent proteins in presence the both the tunnel and the macromolecular crowders outside the tunnel mimicking more closely what happens in the cells. We find that the crowders slow down the escape process. Like for the case without crowders considered in our previous study, the escape time of protein remains to be well fitted by a simple diffusion model. We analyze the dependence of the effective diffusion constant of proteins on temperature and on the crowders’ volume fraction and illustrate the impact of macromolecular crowding on the dynamics of nascent proteins at the ribosomal tunnel.

Presenter: Bui Phuong Thuy