Emergence of superstructures in Biopolymers

A general method is described in which the harmonic analysis of perturbations is applied to the study of superstructures of macromolecular chains. The theoretical approach employed has been to apply harmonic perturbations on the conformational parameters in macromolecular helices of various periodicities and to study the overall variation in structure and its dependency on the periodicity of the perturbation. The results clearly show that when these perturbations do not contain harmonics close to the fundamental periodicities of the polymer chain, the consequent structural effects remain localized and are not productive at a superstructural level. Furthermore, the features of these superstructures are dependent only on the amplitude of the fundamental periodicity component of the perturbation and are generated by topologically equivalent transformations. These findings enable us to devise a model to study and identify transconformational pathways leading to global variations in the structure of the macromolecular chain.