Protein folding rate evolution upon mutations

Abstract

Despite the spectacular success of cutting-edge protein fold prediction methods, many critical questions remain unanswered, including why proteins can reach their native state in a biologically reasonable time. A satisfactory answer to this simple question could shed light on the slowest folding rate of proteins as well as how mutations—amino-acid substitutions and/or post-translational modifications—might affect it. Preliminary results indicate that (i) Anfinsen’s dogma validity ensures that proteins reach their native state on a reasonable timescale regardless of their sequence or length, and (ii) it is feasible to determine the evolution of protein folding rates without accounting for epistasis effects or the mutational trajectories between the starting and target sequences. These results have direct implications for evolutionary biology because they lay the groundwork for a better understanding of why, and to what extent, mutations—a crucial element of evolution and a factor influencing it—affect protein evolvability. Furthermore, they may spur significant progress in our efforts to solve crucial structural biology problems, such as how a sequence encodes its folding.