UNIFIED THEORY OF COLLAPSE, FOLDING, AND GLASS TRANSITIONS IN ASSOCIATIVE-MEMORY HAMILTONIAN MODELS OF PROTEINS

A unified variational theory is developed for collapse, folding, and glass transitions of the proteins modeled by associative-memory Hamiltonians. The mechanisms and conditions of transitions are studied, and the phase diagram is discussed. A quantitative measure of feasibility of folding and an upper bound of memory capacity are derived. The variational method gives several insights to improve simulations for protein-structure predictions.