著者

Kazuki Nakanishi Macoto Kikuchi

出版者

THE PHYSICAL SOCIETY OF JAPAN

雑誌

Journal of the Physical Society of Japan (ISSN:00319015)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.75, no.6, pp.064803, 2006-06-15 (Released:2009-08-27)

参考文献数

17

被引用文献数

4

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We investigate aggregation mechanism of two proteins in a thermodynamically unambiguous manner by considering the finite size effect of free energy landscape of HP lattice protein model. Multi-self-overlap-ensemble Monte Carlo method is used for numerical calculations. We find that a dimer can be formed spontaneously as a thermodynamically stable state when the system is small enough. It implies the possibility that the aggregation of proteins in a cell is triggered when they are confined in a small region by, for example, being surrounded by other macromolecules. We also find that the dimer exhibits a transition between unstable state and metastable state in the infinite system.