[ExI] will as essence

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sun, Jun 24, 2007 at 02:33:47PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

> You are probably referring to Levinthal's Paradox, from 1968:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levinthal_paradox
> http://www.sdsc.edu/~nair/levinthal.html
> 
> It's not really a paradox because obviously proteins do fold into a
> stable configuration in a particular environment, representing a

The incorrect assumption is that all points of the configuration state
space are the same. In reality we're getting a converging folding pathway
funnel in the energetic landscape, with several well-defined
stages along the way.

A lot of the information to guide the folding stages is present
in the primary sequence/wet context.

> trough in electrostatic potential energy between the atoms. This
> configuration should be deducible from the protein sequence, but
> nature is not under any obligation to make it easy for us to compute
> it.

The Blue Gene/L supercomputer was originally designed to solve the
Protein Folding Problem (PFP), by means of brute-force MD. The PFP
is not intractable, however, and http://predictioncenter.org/ has
shown a history of patchwork advances, and is likely to succeed
eventually, and undramatically.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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