() provide a general review of force spectroscopy with a short section on protein unfolding. There's not all that much information here, but it's a good place to go to get a big-picture overview before diving into the more technical papers.
There are two main approaches to modeling protein domain unfolding under tension: Bell's and Kramers'(Schlierf and Rief, 2006; Hummer and Szabo, 2003; Dudko et al., 2006). Bell introduced his model in the context of cell adhesion(Bell, 1978), but it has been widely used to model mechanical unfolding in proteins(Schlierf and Rief, 2006; , ; Carrion-Vazquez et al., 1999) due to it's simplicity and ease of use(Hummer and Szabo, 2003). Kramers introduced his theory in the context of thermally activated barrier crossing, which is how we use it here.
There is an excellent review of Kramers' theory in Hänggi et al. (1990). The bell model is generally considered too elementary to be worth a detailed review in this context, and yet I had trouble finding explicit probability densities that matched my own in Eqn. 20. Properties of the Bell model recieve more coverage under the name of the older and equivalent Gompertz distribution(Gompertz, 1825; Olshansky and Carnes, 1997; Wu et al., 2004). A warning about the ``Gompertz'' model is in order, because there seem to be at least two unfolding/dying rate formulas that go by that name. Compare, for example, Braverman and Mamdani (2008) Eqn. 5 and Juckett and Rosenberg (1993) Fig. 2.
The field of mechanical protein unfolding is developing along three main branches. Some groups are predominantly theoretical,
Evans introduced? the saddle-point Kramers' approximation in a protein unfolding context 1997 (Evans and Ritchie (1997) Eqn. 3). Early work on mechanical unfolding focused on (, ).In the early `00's, the saddle-point/steepest-descent approximation to Kramer's model (Hänggi et al. (1990) Eqn. 4.56c) was introduced into our field(Dudko et al., 2003; Hyeon and Thirumalai, 2003).By the mid `00's, the full-blown double-integral form of Kramer's model (Hänggi et al. (1990) Eqn. 4.56b) was in use(Schlierf and Rief, 2006).
There has been some tangential attempts towards even fancier models. Dudko et al. (2003) attempted to reduce the restrictions of the single-unfolding-path model. Hyeon and Thirumalai (2003) attempted to measure the local roughness using temperature dependent unfolding.
Early molecular dynamics (MD) work on receptor-ligand breakage by Grubmuller 1996 and Izrailev 1997 (according to Evans 1997). Evans and Ritchie (1997) introduces a smart Monte Carlo (SMC) Kramers' simulation.