DIMACS TR: 99-20
Statistical Properties of Contact Maps
Authors: Michele Vendruscolo, Balakrishna Subramanian, Ido Kanter, Eytan
Domany and Joel Lebowitz
ABSTRACT
A contact map is a simple representation of the structure of
proteins and other chain-like macromolecules. This representation is
quite amenable to numerical studies of folding. We show that the number of
contact maps corresponding to the possible configurations of a polypeptide
chain of $N$ amino acids, represented by $(N-1)$-step self avoiding walks
on a lattice, grows exponentially with $N$ for all dimensions $D > 1$.
We carry out exact enumerations in $D=2$ on the square and
triangular lattices for walks of up to 20 steps and investigate
various statistical properties of contact maps corresponding
to such walks.. We also study the exact statistics of contact maps
generated by walks on a ladder.
Paper Available at:
ftp://dimacs.rutgers.edu/pub/dimacs/TechnicalReports/TechReports/1999/99-20.ps.gz
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