Best packing in proteins and DNA
Andrzej Stasiak and John H. Maddocks
NATURE, VOL 406, JULY 2000 pp. 251--252
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Abstract
This article is a News and Views editorial describing an article by Maritan et al (same issue of Nature). Maritan et al use the idea of global radius of curvature introduced by Gonzalez and Maddocks (43) to discuss certain optimal packing problems for tubes or strings, and identify a critical pitch to radius ratio for single helices which just happens to arise for crystal structures of many alpha-helical proteins. We generalize the observation of Maritan et al to remark that the classic B-form double helix for DNA also satisfies a related critical value of pitch to radius ratio.
Keywords
DNA, alpha-helical protein, helix, optimal packing
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