Home > Archives > Additional Archives > Finkelstein, Galzitskaya, Ivankov   A. V. Finkelstein, O. V. Galzitskaya and D. N. Ivankov Institute of Protein Research Russian Academy of Sciences 142290, Pushchino, Moscow Region, Russia afinkel@vega.protres.ru http://www.protres.ru/general Protein folding rate and protein folding nucleus: A Theoretical Study   The universal features of folding are observed close to the point of thermodynamic equilibrium between the native and denatured states. Here the "two-state" transition proceeds without any accumulation of metastable intermediates, and only the structured part of the transition state ("the folding nucleus") is outlined by its essential influence on the folding/unfolding kinetics. Our theory refers to the vicinity of the equilibrium point. First, we show that the protein sizes by themselves outline the possible ranges of the folding/unfolding rates. Then we present a new method for calculating the folding-unfolding rates of globular proteins from their 3D structures. The method is based on solution of kinetic equations for a network of folding-unfolding pathways. It is applied to large many tens of small and middle-size proteins and peptides. The correlation coefficient of the theory and the experiment is 80%, which means that the presented theory (having no adjustable parameters at all) is consistent with the experimental observations. The same theory outlines the location of the protein-folding nucleus in a reasonable concordance with experimentatation.
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