Conformational Search and Potential Energy Analysis of Protein β-Hairpin Formations by Parallel Exhaustive Tree Search

Abstract

This paper reports on our study of the feasible conformations and the potential energy distributions of a β-hairpin called a “tyrosine corner”. Tyrosine corners are a feature of 5 or 6 amino acid residues found in most Greek key β-barrel proteins [2]. According to earlier research results [2], the tyrosine corners appear to contribute to the stability of a Greek key connection over a hairpin connection, and may aid in the process of folding up Greek key structures.