https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/s10189-025-00520-4
Regular Article - Living Systems
Thermal signatures of biomolecules: an effective tool for screening biological defects
Department of Physical Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata, 741246, Mohanpur, West Bengal, India
Received:
20
June
2025
Accepted:
30
August
2025
Published online:
30
September
2025
We investigate the impact of environmental factors and biological defects on the thermal properties of single-helical proteins by analyzing their electronic specific heat (ESH) at constant volume (
). To accurately model these biomolecules, we consider their helical structure and long-range electron hopping within a tight-binding framework. Our findings demonstrate that the ESH spectra can differentiate between defective and pure helical protein molecules, even a sample with a very low contamination (single site defect) level. By comparing the ESH spectra of perfect and defective proteins, we can identify the relative location of the defect and distinguish them based on the level of contamination. This approach could be valuable for medical diagnosis of biological defects and serve as a preliminary screening method before resorting to whole genome sequencing, thereby saving time and resources.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to EDP Sciences, SIF and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2025
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
