Two Ways To Fight Pressure

Abstract

Fishes in extreme depth experience a huge amount of pressure, in some cases almost 1100 times more. To protect their proteins against unfolding, they have adopted two strategies — making small molecules which act a bubble wrap and crowding a lot of proteins together so that the pressure felt by each one is reduced. Here are simulation models of two different proteins illustrating how these strategies can help keep a protein stable in extreme environments like the deep sea.​