Application of optical tweezers in protein folding studies

Abstract

Force spectroscopy has proven to be a very promising tool in the protein folding field. With multiple setups and methods to exert force it has been applied in numerous folding studies. This review will focus on the optical tweezers setup and will outline the basics of optical trapping and how it was used before force spectroscopy. The different methods for exerting force and how they are used to obtain information on the energy landscape of protein folding will also be discussed. Finally several studies in which optical tweezers are used to investigate protein folding will be described, including the effect of ribosomes and chaperones on folding and how force is used in biological processes as blood clotting and proteolysis.