Abstract

ALAS-GUARDADO, Salomón de J.; ROJO, Arturo  and  MERINO, Gabriel. Levinthal paradox: When a contradiction turns logical. Educ. quím [online]. 2011, vol.22, n.1, pp.51-54. ISSN 0187-893X.

It is common that lectures and manuscripts in Biochemistry deal with the Levinthal padarox. Levinthal wondered how long it would take for a protein to fold correctly if it had to sample all possible conformations in three dimensional space. Small proteins usually fold spontaneously within seconds and even the largest proteins fold within minutes. However, the Levinthal's calculations show that any protein needs an infinite time to fold correctly. This problem is basic in life and here we review some of the most important contributions to try to resolve this paradox.

Keywords : paradox; Levinthal; folding; potential energy surface.