Biological and Chemical Physics Commons^™

Protein Folding & Self-Organized Criticality, Arun Bajracharya

Senior Theses

Proteins are known to fold into tertiary structures that determine their functionality in living organisms. However, the complex dynamics of protein folding and the way they consistently fold into the same structures is unknown. Experimental studies of the folding process are difficult as proteins are made of more than one subunit and possess a high degree of conformational flexibility. Theoretically, self-organized criticality (SOC) has provided a framework for understanding complex systems in various scientific disciplines through scale invariance and the associated "fractal" power law behavior. Evidence of this criticality phenomena has been found in neural systems, cell cultures, and anesthetized …