Project Abstract:

Protein folding is one of the most complicated problems in structural biology. Although it is not yet possible to reliably predict the native structure of a protein from its sequence, the understanding of mechanisms governing protein folding, which also lead to better structure prediction algorithms, has progressed considerably. A number of mechanisms, such as “molten globule” model and “Folding Funnels” model, etc, have been proposed to explain how naturally occurring proteins reach their native structures with a biologically relevant time scale. However, most of the mechanism only can qualitatively describe protein folding process. In this project, by using thermodynamics, kinetics and statistical methods, we will construct protein folding model which can give the quantitative information of protein folding.