Equation 1 · Part 2 · Structure from Sequence: What Protein Folding Prediction Did and Did Not Settle
Symbol nu^L-1
What this part means
n-1 is one of the signed contributions combined to compute the quantity on the left.
Its job in the formula
n-1 is one of the signed contributions combined to compute the quantity on the left.
Full expression→Symbol nu^L-1→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
The standard framing of why search cannot be the mechanism is combinatorial. Treat each residue as having some small number of accessible backbone conformations, and the number of chain configurations is exponential in length: . Take a modest three states per residue and a hundred-residue chain. The arithmetic gives 3^{100} 5.2 10^{47} configurations; sampling one every 10^{-13} seconds would take about 5 10^{34} seconds, on the order of 10^{27} years. Real proteins of that size fold in microseconds to seconds. The gap is not a factor to be tightened by better bookkeeping; it is dozens of orders of magnitude.
Learn the underlying idea
An exponent tells how a base is used in multiplication. In x³, x is the base and 3 is the exponent: x³ = x × x × x.
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Sources cited in the article section
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