Vila JA. Rethinking the protein folding problem from a new perspective.
EUROPEAN BIOPHYSICS JOURNAL : EBJ 2023:10.1007/s00249-023-01657-w. [PMID:
37165178 DOI:
10.1007/s00249-023-01657-w]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/28/2022] [Revised: 04/16/2023] [Accepted: 04/30/2023] [Indexed: 05/12/2023]
Abstract
One of the main concerns of Anfinsen was to reveal the connection between the amino-acid sequence and their biologically active conformation. This search gave rise to two crucial questions in structural biology, namely, why the proteins fold and how a sequence encodes its folding. As to the why, he proposes a plausible answer, namely, the thermodynamic hypothesis. As to the how, this remains an unsolved challenge. Consequently, the protein folding problem is examined here from a new perspective, namely, as an 'analytic whole'. Conceiving the protein folding in this way enabled us to (i) examine in detail why the force-field-based approaches have failed, among other purposes, in their ability to predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein accurately; (ii) propose how to redefine them to prevent these shortcomings, and (iii) conjecture on the origin of the state-of-the-art numerical-methods success to predict the tridimensional structure of proteins accurately.
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