Speakur

Word Pronunciation & Dictionary

levinthal's paradox

Word Rarity Very rare

Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English

Syllables
levinthal's -para-dox
IPA
33
Scrabble Score
17
Letters
3
Syllables
14
Unique Chars

Meaning

name

The observation that, because of the very large number of degrees of freedom in an unfolded polypeptide chain, the molecule has an astronomically large number of possible conformations, and therefore sequentially sampling all the possible conformations is not practical, yet most small proteins fold spontaneously on a millisecond or even microsecond timescale.

Etymology

After Cyrus Levinthal, who remarked upon it in 1969.

Questions

What does levinthal's paradox mean?
The observation that, because of the very large number of degrees of freedom in an unfolded polypeptide chain, the molecule has an astronomically large number of possible conformations, and therefore sequentially sampling all the possible conformations is not practical, yet most small proteins fold spontaneously on a millisecond or even microsecond timescale.
Where does levinthal's paradox come from?
After Cyrus Levinthal, who remarked upon it in 1969.

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