PROTEIN-FOLDING FROM A COMBINATORIAL PERSPECTIVE

Combinatorial mutagenesis experiments show the existence of many diffe rent solutions to the problem of complementary packing of non-polar si dechains in the protein core. They suggest that a significant amount o f structural information is carried by the simple pattern of polar and non-polar residues along the polypeptide chain, indicate that the for mation of buried polar interactions may be a fundamentally slow step i n protein folding and show that proteins with many native properties o ccur at reasonable frequencies in random sequence libraries.