WHY DO PROTEIN ARCHITECTURES HAVE BOLTZMANN-LIKE STATISTICS

A theoretical study has shown that the occurrence of various structura l elements in stable folds of random copolymers is exponentially depen dent on the own energy of the element. A similar occurrence-on-energy dependence is observed in globular proteins(1) from the level of amino acid conformations to the level of overall architectures. Thus, the s tructural features stabilized by many random sequences are typical of globular proteins while the features rarely observed in proteins are t hose which are stabilized by only a minor part of the random sequences . (C) 1995 Wiley-Liss, Inc.