Question

There are a large number of protein folds available, compared to millions of protein sequences.

(a) True

(b) False

This question was addressed to me by my school principal while I was bunking the class.

This is a very interesting question from Threading and Fold Recognition topic in division Protein Tertiary Structure Prediction of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

Right option is (b) False

Explanation: There are only small number of protein folds available (<1,000), compared to millions of protein sequences. This means that protein structures tend to be more conserved than protein sequences. Consequently, many proteins can share a similar fold even in the absence of sequence similarities. This allowed the development of computational methods to predict protein structures beyond sequence similarities.