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Levinthal's paradox
1Laboratory of Chemical Physics, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892.
Abstract:
Levinthal's paradox is that finding the native folded state of a protein by a random search among all possible configurations can take an enormously long time. Yet proteins can fold in seconds or less. Mathematical analysis of a simple model shows that a small and physically reasonable energy bias against locally unfavorable configurations, of the order of a few kT, can reduce Levinthal's time to a biologically significant size.