ABSTRACT

A fundamental problem in biochemistry is to understand how metabolic energy is stored and transported in biological molecules. An interesting candidate is the amide-I vibration in protein. Likewise in thinking about Daydov's soliton, introduced the linear equation describing dispersion of amide-I vibrational energy and the linear equation for lingitudinal sound waves before considering their augmentation to the nonlinear coupled system. It is interesting to observe that the amide-I vibration in protein that Davydov proposed as the basis for his soliton model is precisely a "vibrational subgroup of a relevant molecule." The first specific suggestion of soliton states on DNA invoked to describe the thermal breaking of hydrogen bonds between base pairs which, in turn, was supposed to explain experimental measurements of hydrogen deuterium exchange rates. This idea has been developed in some detail as the "dynamic plane base-rotator model" for which chaotic behavior has been investigated.