Post-Grant Reports

Title

Student-Faculty Collaborative Research Grant Report

Document Type

Report

Publication Date

3-5-2014

Disciplines

Biological and Chemical Physics | Physics

Abstract

Fully understanding protein folding is a current problem at the interface of biology and physics with significant implications in medicine. Interdisciplinary problems often benefit from a new perspective. This work attempts to bring a novel perspective to understanding the protein folding process. Using a simple model, we created a protein folding simulation to study the possible connections between protein folding and self-organized critical systems. Self–organized critical systems have been used to explain 1/f noise and other systems in physics, as well as several other systems outside of physics. We found some evidence that the simple model considered exhibits self-organized criticality and is fairly robust against changes in the system parameters. To explore larger systems, improvements in computation time are needed.

Comments

This research was conducted as part of a Linfield College Student-Faculty Collaborative Research Grant in 2013, funded by the Office of Academic Affairs.

Student collaborators were Tyler J. Schiewe, Arun Bajracharya, and Yura Sim.

  Contact Author

Share

COinS