Protein Folding

Hide the oily beads

An interactive lesson with 5 steps, about 5 minutes: you predict, drag and solve, with instant feedback on every answer. It runs in your browser and needs JavaScript.

What you’ll learn

• Oily side chains cluster inside; polar ones face water.
• The hydrophobic effect is mainly about water’s entropy.
• Proteins fold down an energy funnel, not by random search.

Steps

1. The hydrophobic effect
2. A small fold
3. Ten beads
4. Levinthal’s paradox
5. A famous benchmark