Applications of knot theory to biology/pharmacology What are the applications of knot theory to biology/pharmacology?
I guess there should be some, since proteins are quite long and some of their properties are probably related to whether they are knotted or not.

Some related questions:

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*Applications of knot theory


*Applications of group theory to math. biology (pharmacology) ?


*Any applications integrable systems (pde,ode, q-,...) to math. biology (pharmakinetics, pharmadynamics) ?


*"Graphical models" and "gene finding and diagnosis of diseases" ?


*Mathematics and cancer research?
 A: In the end of this paper by Loius Kauffman and Jay Goldman, they use some properties of rational tangles to deduce the different ways in which DNA can recombine. I think I have seen other papers that do similar things.
A: A web search on  DNA and Knot Theory yields hits, for example
http://www.tiem.utk.edu/~gross/bioed/webmodules/DNAknot.html
A: Some papers on knots and proteins:

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*William R. Taylor, A deeply knotted protein structure and how it might fold, Nature, Volume 406, pages 916–919, August 2000.


*Michael A. Erdmann, Protein similarity from knot theory: geometric convolution and line weavings, Journal of Computational Biology, Volume 12, Issue 6, pages 609-637, July 2005.


*Firas Khatib,  Matthew T. Weirauch,  Carol A. Rohl, Rapid knot detection and application to protein structure prediction, Bioinformatics, Volume 22, Issue 14, pages e252–e259, July 2006.


*Peter Virnau, Leonid A. Mirny, Mehran Kardar, Intricate knots in proteins: function and evolution, PLoS Computational Biology, September 2006.


*Rama Mishra, Shantha Bhushan, Knot theory in understanding proteins, Journal of Mathematical Biology, Volume 65, pages 1187–1213, December 2012.

Related:

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*Applications of knot theory


*Measures of entangledness of an open curve
