Effect of electrostatic interactions on the formation of proton transfer pathways in human carbonic anhydrase II

We report here a theoretical study on the effect of electrostatic interactions on the formation of dynamical, proton-conducting hydrogen-bonded networks in the protein HCA II. The conformational fluctuations of His-64 is found to contribute crucially to the mechanism of such path formation irrespective of the way electrostatic interactions are modelled.