Mechanical unfolding of proteins: reduction to a single-reaction coordinate unfolding potential, and an application of the Jarzynski Relation

Single molecule force spectroscopy (AFM, optical tweezers, etc) has revolutionized the study of many biopolymers, including DNA, RNA, and proteins. In this talk I will discuss recent work on modelling of mechanical unfolding of proteins, as often probed by AFM. I will address two issues in obtaining a coarse-grained description of protein unfolding: how to project the entire energy landscape onto an effective one dimensional unfolding potential, and how to apply the Jarzynski Relation to extract equilibrium free energies from nonequilibrium unfolding experiments.