PROTEIN FOLDING

One of the large challenges in modern science is working out how proteins curl up into their complex shapes. They do this in fractions of a second, always adopting the same three-dimensional form. And while we have, for the past fifty years, known the exact rule that uniquely determines the amino-acid sequence of a protein from the corresponding DNA sequence, the second part of the genetic code, that is the ability to determine the full 3D structure of the protein from its amino-acid sequence, is still missing. This is the essence of the so-called "protein folding problem": given an amino-acid sequence how does one predict the 3D shape that this protein will take upon folding? Since it is this shape that ultimately determines the biological function of a protein, solving the problem is of great importance.