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Protein thermodynamics

Are native proteins metastable?

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Thermodynamic measurements show that the most stable structural form of a number of proteins under cellular conditions is fibrillar, implying that their functional states may only be metastable.

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Figure 1: Schematic energy landscape for folding and aggregation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. D. Thirumalai and G. Reddy are in the Institute for Physical Science and Technology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA,

    D. Thirumalai & G. Reddy

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  1. D. Thirumalai
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  2. G. Reddy
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Correspondence to D. Thirumalai.

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Thirumalai, D., Reddy, G. Are native proteins metastable?. Nature Chem 3, 910–911 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchem.1207

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