Human bodies have a narrow range of temperatures at which they function properly. Proteins behave similarly: At ambient temperatures they fold as needed for their biological purposes, but if they get too hot or too cold, their structures unravel. The details of what happens to proteins away from their conformational sweet spot and how or why they denature could provide insight into how they manage to find their functional forms at physiological conditions in the first place.
Proteins found in nature don’t exist in a vacuum, and the molecules surrounding them affect their behavior (see the article by Diego Krapf and Ralf Metzler, Physics Today, September 2019, page 48). It’s therefore not enough to consider only how interactions within a protein change with temperature; to fully understand a protein’s behavior, the dynamics and structure of the solvent—typically water—must also be taken into account.
At the intersection of protein...
