Protein folding and cosmology

Abstract

Protein denaturing induced by supercooling is interpreted as a process where some or all internal symmetries of the native protein are spontaneously broken. Hence, the free-energy potential corresponding to a folding-funnel landscape becomes temperature-dependent and describes a phase transition. The idea that deformed vortices could be produced in the transition induced by temperature quenching, from native proteins to unfolded conformations is discussed in terms of the Zurek mechanism that implements the analogy between vortices, created in the laboratory at low energy, and the cosmic strings which are thought to have been left after symmetry breaking phase transitions in the early universe. An experiment is proposed to test the above idea which generalizes the cosmological analogy to also encompass biological systems and push a step ahead the view that protein folding is a biological equivalent of the big bang.