Scaling of Folding Times with Protein Size
- 18 December 2004
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Chemical Society (ACS) in Journal of the American Chemical Society
- Vol. 127 (2) , 480-481
- https://doi.org/10.1021/ja044449u
Abstract
Current experimental data show a 9-orders-of-magnitude span in the folding times of proteins. Such a wide range is typically considered a direct consequence of the complexity in structural and sequence patterns of natural proteins. By using a database of 69 proteins and peptides analyzed experimentally, we observe that the folding time scales with the number of residues in the protein. The correlation coefficient is 0.74 or higher, and indicates that it is possible to predict the folding time of a protein with a precision of ∼1.1 times decades from just its size. A simple thermodynamic analysis of this correlation suggests that the smallest proteins are expected to have very marginal free energy barriers to folding.Keywords
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