On some pecularities of intermolecular and intramolecular interactions

The ground state electronic energy represents a complicated function of the nuclear coordinates. Even for relatively small molecules this function may have many minima in the corresponding "energy landscape", very often myriads of minima, each of them corresponding to a stable configuration of the nuclei. This is why predicting the lowest-energy conformation or configuration represents a formidable task. There were many attempts to solve this problem for protein molecules, for which it is believed their native conformation corresponds to the lowest free energy. The challenge to find this conformation from a given sequence of amino acids is known as a "second genetic code". In fact all of these attempts based on some smoothing of the energy landscape. In the article some of these smoothing techniques are described, from a generic one to those, which finally turned out to be highly successful in finding native structures of globular proteins. When discussing the contributions to the conformational energy the importance of the hydrophobic effect as well as of the electrostatic interactions has been stressed. In particular it turned out that the dipole moments of the NH and of the CO bonds in proteins functioning in nature are oriented to good accuracy along the local intramolecular electric field. Thanks to enormous effort of the protein folding community it is possible to design such amino acid sequences, which fold to the desired protein 3D structure. A certain reliable theoretical technique of protein folding has been used to study a possibility of conformational autocatalysis. It turned out that a small protein of 32 amino acids, with carefully predesigned amino acid sequence, exhibits indeed such an effect, which may be seen as a model of the prion disease propagation