2024/05/21 by Sourav Kundu, Kundu, Sourav, Siddhartha Lal +1
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Chemistry · #Biological Physics (physics.bio-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) #Protein Structure and Dynamics #RNA and protein synthesis mechanisms #thermodynamics and calorimetric analyses
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2405.12647
openalex publication_date 2024/05/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We present a theoretical investigation of the electronic specific heat (ESH) at constant volume (Cv) of single-helical proteins modeled within the tight-binding (TB) framework. We study the effects of helical symmetry, long-range hopping, environment and biological defects on thermal properties. We employ a general TB model to incorporate all parameters relevant to the helical structure of the protein. In order to provide additional insights into our results for the ESH, we also study the electronic density of states for various disorder strengths. We observe that the variation of the specific heat with disorder is very different in low and high temperature regimes, though the variation of ESH with temperature possesses a universal pattern upon varying disorder strengths related to environmental effects. Lastly, we propose an interesting application of the ESH spectra of proteins. We show that by studying the ESH of single-helical proteins, one can distinguish a defective sample from a pure one. This observation can serve as the basis of a screening technique that can be applied prior to a whole genome testing, thereby saving valuable time & resources.