Physicists Discover Quantum Law Of Protein Folding

February 22, 2011 | Source: The physics ArXiv blog

Liaofu Luo at the Inner Mongolia University and Jun Lu at the Inner Mongolia University of Technology, both in China,  have developed a mathematical model for how protein folding depends on temperature, and have derived equations that describe how the rate of “quantum folding” would change with temperature.

Their astonishing result is that this quantum transition model fits the folding curves of 15 different proteins and even explains the difference in folding and unfolding rates of the same proteins.