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Protein thermodynamics

Are native proteins metastable?

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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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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