Functional coding principle, proteins

The secondary, tertiary and quartary structure of proteins determine their function, activity and specificity in the living cell. ANFINSEN demonstrated in a series of experiments that the process of protein folding occurs spontaneously without the need of any additional information beyond that coded in the amino acid sequence of the polypeptide chain Consequently, the primary structure ddines the unique spatial arrangement, i.e. the so-called native conformation, of every residue. In principle, it should be possible to predict the protein structure from the amino acid sequence if this interrelation could be decoded. 

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