Glassy Dynamics and Memory Effects in an Intrinsically Disordered Protein Construct

Ian L. Morgan, Ram Avinery, Gil Rahamim, Roy Beck, Omar A. Saleh

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

29 Scopus citations

Abstract

Glassy, nonexponential relaxations in globular proteins are typically attributed to conformational behaviors that are missing from intrinsically disordered proteins. Yet, we show that single molecules of a disordered-protein construct display two signatures of glassy dynamics, logarithmic relaxations and a Kovacs memory effect, in response to changes in applied tension. We attribute this to the presence of multiple independent local structures in the chain, which we corroborate with a model that correctly predicts the force dependence of the relaxation. The mechanism established here likely applies to other disordered proteins.

Original languageEnglish
Article number058001
JournalPhysical Review Letters
Volume125
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - 31 Jul 2020

Funding

FundersFunder number
National Science Foundation1715627
United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation2016696
Israel Science Foundation550/15, 453/17

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