An artist's representation of a free-energy landscape and two possible paths a protein might follow (left) to fold correctly and a third path (right) that leads to a misfolded state. Disclaimer ...

While part of the barrier to the folding of small proteins thus appears to be enthalpic, α-lytic protease, a protein with a huge free energy barrier to folding, actually has a negative activation ...

This kind of tight folding and packing minimizes the overall free energy of the protein. An average protein has about 300 amino acid residues. If we consider that there are twenty different amino ...