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About the Protein Space Vastness

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Abstract

An accurate estimation of the Protein Space size, in light of the factors that govern it, is a long-standing problem and of paramount importance in evolutionary biology, since it determines the nature of protein evolvability. A simple analysis will enable us to, firstly, reduce an unrealistic Protein Space size of ~ 10130 sequences, for a 100-residues polypeptide chain, to ~ 109 functional proteins and, secondly, estimate a robust average-mutation rate per amino acid (ξ ~ 1.23) and infer from it, in light of the protein marginal stability, that only a fraction of the sequence will be available at any one time for a functional protein to evolve. Although this result does not solve the Protein Space vastness problem frames it in a more rational one and illustrates the impact of the marginal stability on protein evolvability.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank to Laura Mascotti, Walter Lapadula and Maximiliano Juri Ayub for reading the manuscript and making valuable comments and suggestions. The author acknowledges financial support from the IMASL-CONICET (PIP-0087) and ANPCyT (Grant Nos. PICT-0767; and PICT-2212), Argentina.

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  1. IMASL-CONICET, Universidad Nacional de San Luis, Ejército de Los Andes 950, 5700, San Luis, Argentina

    Jorge A. Vila

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Correspondence to Jorge A. Vila.

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Vila, J.A. About the Protein Space Vastness. Protein J 39, 472–475 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10930-020-09939-4

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