[LqHII]

Hi, I am a physics student and for a course of biophysics i am attending i have to give a lecture on "van der Waals interactions in Biology".
I think I have found enough material (books, articles, etc.) regarding the physics of these interactions, but I haven't found much on the biological role of them. Indeed, in the material I have found (usually biochemistry books) it is just said that these are very important interactions but it's just that. I haven't found anything deep and quantitative about their role. They say VdW interactions play a key role in the DNA, in the protein folding, etc. but nothing more detailed.

So I would like to ask you if u can suggest me some books or articles or anything else in which I can find something more quantitative and detailed about their role in "biology".

Thanks in advance!

[Babcock_Hall]

That is a very large subject.  Do you have a standard textbook in biochemistry?  If not, you need to get access to one.  That would be a good place to start.  Let me ask you a question, when a hormone binds to its receptor, are the bonds between the two generally covalent or noncovalent?

[OrgXemProf]

Follow-up to Babcock_Hall's suggestions:

1. Please see the online article entitled "Ligand Binding Domain" (i. e., the domain responsible for hormone binding). This article was contributed by members of U. Illionis- Champaign/Urbana's Theoretical & Computational Biophysics Group.

URL: www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/smd_imd/rar_dna/

2. Estrogen receptors (another online article):

URL: http://www.proteopedia.org/wiki/index.php/Estrogen_receptor

[Yggdrasil]

At a basic level, reading any book chapter on intermolecular interactions from a biochemistry textbook should give you a basic understanding of how vdw interactions are important for protein folding, protein-ligand interactions and protein-protein interactions.  Anytime the book mentions steric complementarity or "lock and key" models, vdw forces are very important to those ideas.

If you want something very quantitative about vdw interactions, you might consider looking into the force fields that biophysicists use to model inter- and intra-molecular forces in molecular dynamics simulations.

A more "fun" example would be explaining how geckos use vdw forces to stick to walls.

[Babcock_Hall]

Consider also how the two strands of DNA are held together, or how membranes are held together.  Many years ago Nomura showed how one of the subunits of a ribosome was able to self-assemble.

One question that you might find interesting is how the enzyme isolecyl t-RNA synthetase discriminates successfully against valine.  Van der Waals forces between the enzyme and its substrate, while obviously important, are not quite enough to give the enzyme sufficient specificity.  Therefore, this enzyme has a proofreading function.

[Babcock_Hall]

Here is a review on the reconstruction of both ribosome subunits done by Nomura and collaborators:  https://cshmonographs.org/index.php/monographs/article/view/3964