> The paper says a protein with 100 amino acids may assume 8^100 conformations and nature solves for that in 1 second There are some problems with this - first

> The paper says a protein with 100 amino acids may assume 8^100 conformations and nature solves for that in 1 second There are some problems with this - firstly that paper is quite old. Not sure what the current state of the art is but this might be helpful : http://folding.stanford.edu/dig-deeper http://folding.stanford.edu/dig-deeper Secondly, the idea that the protein might adopt any of 8^100 (or some large number) of combinations is not quite right. Consider a very simple model of just a chain of nodes connected together on a 2D grid. There are certainly a large number of possible ways to arrange this chain on the grid, but if you start off in one particular arrangement (call it 'unfolded') and then move towards a more compact one ('folded') then you will follow some particular path of arrangements. However, there are ideas around 'quantum biology' from Johnjoe Mcfadden (http://www.johnjoemcfadden.com/ http://www.johnjoemcfadden.com/) that might be interesting.