Levinthal's paradox
Levinthal's paradox proper noun: the observation that, because of the very large number of degrees of freedom in an unfolded polypeptide chain, the molecule has an astronomically large number of possible conformations, and therefore sequentially sampling all the possible conformations is not practical, yet most small proteins fold spontaneously on a millisecond or even microsecond timescale.
Proper noun
Levinthal's paradox
- The observation that, because of the very large number of degrees of freedom in an unfolded polypeptide chain, the molecule has an astronomically large number of possible conformations, and therefore sequentially sampling all the possible conformations is not practical, yet most small proteins fold spontaneously on a millisecond or even microsecond timescale.
Origin of Levinthal's paradox
After Cyrus Levinthal, who remarked upon it in 1969.
Questions about Levinthal's paradox
- What does Levinthal's paradox mean?
- Levinthal's paradox means the observation that, because of the very large number of degrees of freedom in an unfolded polypeptide chain, the molecule has an astronomically large number of possible conformations, and therefore sequentially sampling all the possible conformations is not practical, yet most small proteins fold spontaneously on a millisecond or even microsecond timescale.
- What part of speech is Levinthal's paradox?
- Levinthal's paradox is a proper noun.
Words near Levinthal's paradox in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: Levinthal's paradox (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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