A simple quantitative model of macromolecular crowding effects on protein folding: Application to the murine prion protein(121–231)

A model of protein folding kinetics is applied to study the effects of macromolecular crowding on protein folding rate and stability. Macromolecular crowding is found to promote a decrease of the entropic cost of folding of proteins that produces an increase of both the stability and the folding rate. The acceleration of the folding rate due to macromolecular crowding is shown to be a topology-dependent effect. The model is applied to the folding dynamics of the murine prion protein (121–231). The differential effect of macromolecular crowding as a function of protein topology suffices to make non-native configurations relatively more accessible.