SIE: Small knotty proteins and Three way protein interactions

Other entries in this Sparsity In Everything (SIE) series can be found here. In the meantime, I just came across these two examples this week:

Martin Lundgren and Antti J. Niemi provide an explanation in Knots and Swelling in Protein Folding as to why small knotty proteins are rare.

I also caught this one up in Dick Lipton's blog about protein interaction when he mentioned the talk of Jim Heath at Caltech:

A key is that most interactions are pairwise between proteins. He said that there is only one known example of three proteins that interact together. This raises the hope that powerful theory ideas could play a role here.

One more thing, Terry Tao has a nice entry on Benford’s law, Zipf’s law, and the Pareto distribution. As I explained before in the Sparsity in Everything series of entries, as soon as you have a power law and a thresholding factor of convenience, you have sparsity and you can begin to think of ways one can apply Compressive Sensing techniques when sampling in these fields.

Credit: Medgadget, Knotty Proteins.