Another effect that is very important is determining how proteins fold is the fact that they’re dissolved in liquid water, and so hydrophilic parts of the protein want to be on the surface, while hydrophobic parts want to be on the inside, near other hydrophobic parts. This is largely an entropic force/effect.
Some other things that are true:
100% of the bonds in hydrogen gas are covalent.
Most of the fundamental particles in a water molecule are held together by the strong nuclear force, which is a much stronger binding than covalent bonds.
If you pull on a protein and stretch it apart, it looks like a long chain (maybe with a few crosslinks).
This is a non-zero amount of structure, but it looks nothing like the fully folded protein.
If we ask how the chain with the crosslinks is held together, the answer is covalent bonds that were either in the amino acids originally, or were formed when the ribosome assembled them into a chain, (or in the case of the disulfide crosslinks, were formed during the folding process).
But if we ask where the rest of the protein’s structure came from, then the answer is hydrogen bonds and hydrophobic/hydrophilic forces.
Another effect that is very important is determining how proteins fold is the fact that they’re dissolved in liquid water, and so hydrophilic parts of the protein want to be on the surface, while hydrophobic parts want to be on the inside, near other hydrophobic parts. This is largely an entropic force/effect.
Some other things that are true:
100% of the bonds in hydrogen gas are covalent.
Most of the fundamental particles in a water molecule are held together by the strong nuclear force, which is a much stronger binding than covalent bonds.
If you pull on a protein and stretch it apart, it looks like a long chain (maybe with a few crosslinks).
This is a non-zero amount of structure, but it looks nothing like the fully folded protein.
If we ask how the chain with the crosslinks is held together, the answer is covalent bonds that were either in the amino acids originally, or were formed when the ribosome assembled them into a chain, (or in the case of the disulfide crosslinks, were formed during the folding process).
But if we ask where the rest of the protein’s structure came from, then the answer is hydrogen bonds and hydrophobic/hydrophilic forces.