Ideal Glasses and Protein Network Dynamics

Abstract

Quantitative topological analogies between the flexibilities of optimized inorganic glasses, small biological molecules, and proteins suggest that mean field estimates of internal stress are useful in identifying mechanisms supporting living materials and their enzymatic products. These analogies bode well for emerging minimalist flexibility models of protein dynamics. Application to trehalose, the optimal bioprotective material, leads to a remarkably simple mechanical model, closely parallel to mechanical effects observed in sandwich-like proteins.