Molecular Dynamics of Monomeric IAPP in Solution: A Study of IAPP in Water at the Percolation Transition

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Chapter, Introduction:
The word protein was coined by the Swedish scientist Jöns Berzelius in 1838 to describe a certain class of molecules and their importance.1,2 In fact, it derives from the Greek word proteØoc of primary importance which in turn derives from the word protoc first. 3,4 After almost 150 years, one can read the opening sentence of the first chapter of the book on the structure and molecular properties of proteins by Creighton 5 Virtually every property that characterizes a living organism is affected by proteins. Proteins: Structure and Molecular Properties, Creighton (1993) and only wonder how much there still is to discover, in order to fully understand how these organic molecules, constituting living organisms, function. What is fascinating about proteins is the multitude of roles they have within living organisms, from enzymatic catalysis to transport and storage, and from functions as complex as biogenesis to being simply structural, just to mention a few primary functions carried out by proteins. In other words, each cell carries out ist activities through the expression of ist genes by means of ist working molecules, i.e., the proteins. How many proteins are encoded by a simple unicellular eukaryote like saccharomyces cerevisiae? The predicted number expressed by this yeast genome is 6200 (as can be found on Table 7.3 in Molecular Cell Biology by Lodish et al. (2000)). But what is even more astonishing is the fact that thousands of primary structures are linear chains consisting of a combination of only twenty amino acids. A protein can thus be considered a word, determined by a sequence of letters of the alphabet that has a meaning.6 Once the sequence of amino acids has been found, the adventure begins! The reason is that many times the function of the protein is still unknown. In fact, the primary structure of the object of this study, i.e., islet amyloid polypeptide (IAPP), is known, albeit ist biological function remains