2002/09/30 by Richard P. Sear · 11 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Chemistry · Materials Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Analytical Chemistry (journal) #Biochemistry #Biology #Charge (physics) #Chemistry #Chromatography #Computational chemistry #Enzyme Structure and Function #Function (biology) #Gaussian #Genetics #Mathematics #Physical chemistry #Physics #Protein Structure and Dynamics #Proteome #Quantum mechanics #RNA and protein synthesis mechanisms #Salt (chemistry) #Standard deviation #Statistics #Thermodynamics #Virial coefficient #Virial theorem #Volume (thermodynamics) #Zero (linguistics) #cond-mat.soft #q-bio.BM
paper · pdf · doi:10.1063/1.1544556
published in The Journal of Chemical Physics 118(11), 5157-5161 (American Institute of Physics) · 7 pages, 3 figures. v2 has new brief discussion of charge effects on protein interactions in vivo
arxiv created 2002/12/17 · openalex publication_date 2003/02/28 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Bacteria typically have a few thousand different proteins. The number of proteins with a given charge is a roughly Gaussian function of charge—centered near zero, and with a width around ten (in units of the charge on the proton). We have used the charges on E. coli’s proteins to estimate the changes in the second virial coefficients of all its proteins as the concentration of a 1:1 salt is increased. The second virial coefficient has dimensions of volume and we find that on average it decreases by about twice the average volume of a protein when the salt concentration is increased from 0.2 to 1 M. The standard deviation of the decrease is of the same order. The consequences of this for the complex mixture of proteins inside an E. coli cell, are briefly discussed.