Investigating Biological Matter with Theoretical Nuclear Physics Methods

TL;DR

This paper explores how methods from theoretical nuclear physics, especially path integral formulations, can be adapted to study biomolecular dynamics, offering new insights into protein folding processes.

Contribution

It introduces the adaptation of nuclear physics techniques to biomolecular systems, specifically applying path integral methods to improve protein folding simulations.

Findings

Path integral methods help overcome limitations in atomistic protein folding simulations.

Analogies between nuclear matter and biomolecules enable cross-disciplinary methodological advances.

The approach provides new perspectives on collective excitations in biomolecular dynamics.

Abstract

The internal dynamics of strongly interacting systems and that of biomolecules such as proteins display several important analogies, despite the huge difference in their characteristic energy and length scales. For example, in all such systems, collective excitations, cooperative transitions and phase transitions emerge as the result of the interplay of strong correlations with quantum or thermal fluctuations. In view of such an observation, some theoretical methods initially developed in the context of theoretical nuclear physics have been adapted to investigate the dynamics of biomolecules. In this talk, we review some of our recent studies performed along this direction. In particular, we discuss how the path integral formulation of the molecular dynamics allows to overcome some of the long-standing problems and limitations which emerge when simulating the protein folding dynamics at the atomistic level of detail.