Abstract
Although globular homopolymers display an abundance of knots (Virnau et al, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 127, 15102 (2005)), there are few knots in proteins and DNA. Can this absence of entanglement be explained in terms of statistical mechanics or is there
an evolutionary bias? Do knots in proteins serve a purpose and how do they actually fold? After a brief discussion of knots in polymers and DNA, we will present an overview of knotted proteins in the current version of the Protein Data Bank (Virnau et al, PLOS Comp Biol 2, e122 (2006)). We will also discuss some particularly intriguing examples of this set and the evolutionary context in which knots appear.
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