Biasing effects of receptor-ligand complexes on protein-unfolding statistics

Schoeler, Constantin; Verdorfer, Tobias; Gaub, Hermann E. and Nash, Michael A. (2016): Biasing effects of receptor-ligand complexes on protein-unfolding statistics. In: Physical Review E, Vol. 94, No. 4, 42412

Abstract

Protein receptor-ligand pairs are increasingly used as specific molecular handles in single-molecule protein-unfolding experiments. Further, known marker domains, also referred to as fingerprints, provide unique unfolding signatures to identify specific single-molecule interactions, when receptor-ligand pairs themselves are investigated. We show here that in cases where there is an overlap between the probability distribution associated with fingerprint domain unfolding and that associated with receptor-ligand dissociation, the experimentally measured force distributions are mutually biased. This biasing effect masks the true parameters of the underlying free energy landscape. To address this, we present a model-free theoretical framework that corrects for the biasing effect caused by such overlapping distributions.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Faculties: Physics
• Subjects: 500 Science > 530 Physics
• ISSN: 2470-0045
• Language: English