Organization of biological systems: some principles and models.

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses some of the key principles that may be involved in the construction of biological units from basic components and presents a set of examples in which the processes of biological organization can be modeled and simulated using these principles. The first example deals with the folding of polypeptide chains to form globular protein molecules. The chapter explores the hypothesis that the broad features of the tertiary structure of a protein may be determined by simple distance constraints that can be deduced from the proteins' amino acid sequence or primary structure. The underlying idea is that it may not be necessary to take into account all of the intricate molecular interactions occurring in a polypeptide chain to predict its three-dimensional structure. The second example considers a thermodynamic model showing how protein molecules may combine to form stable aggregates. The emphasis is on determining the mechanism that enables protein molecules to combine in a highly selective way to produce genetically predetermined structures.