Levinthal's paradox

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Levinthal's paradox is a thought experiment in the field of computational protein structure prediction that concerns the mechanism through which peptides reach a stable native configuration, given the large amount of folding conformations. In theory, a brute force search, testing all possible conformations, would take longer than the age of the Universe to identify the minimum energy configuration (the native state) even for small peptides. In reality, protein folding happens very quickly, even for complex structures, suggesting that the intermediate structures are steered to a stable state through an uneven energy landscape.

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