Capturing the essence of folding and functions of biomolecules using Coarse-Grained Models

TL;DR

This paper reviews how coarse-grained models, inspired by polymer physics, effectively capture the folding and functions of biomolecules across diverse length and time scales, enabling broad biological insights.

Contribution

It highlights recent developments and applications of coarse-grained models in understanding biomolecular folding and nanomachine functions.

Findings

Coarse-grained models successfully describe DNA, RNA, and protein folding.

Recent applications extend to biological nanomachines.

Simulations are now capable of addressing complex biological phenomena.

Abstract

The distances over which biological molecules and their complexes can function range from a few nanometres, in the case of folded structures, to millimetres, for example during chromosome organization. Describing phenomena that cover such diverse length, and also time scales, requires models that capture the underlying physics for the particular length scale of interest. Theoretical ideas, in particular, concepts from polymer physics, have guided the development of coarse-grained models to study folding of DNA, RNA, and proteins. More recently, such models and their variants have been applied to the functions of biological nanomachines. Simulations using coarse-grained models are now poised to address a wide range of problems in biology.