FIGURE 5.

Plot of the fraction of successful folding events as a function of the percentage of native contacts in the initial conformation. We compared the folding efficiency in the presence (⋄) and absence (□) of translocation. The picture shows that translocation results in a strong increase in the folding efficiency of highly nonnative states. For conformations that are closer to the native state, the role of translocation becomes less important. Complete translocation becomes less likely as the percentage of native contacts in the initial (prefolding) state increases. This observation is in agreement with the experimental evidence that successful folding can take place in a single GroEL barrel. In these experiments, the GroEL barrel will trap a wide range of proteins at varying degrees of folding. Intrabarrel conversion to the native state should be easy for proteins that already have a fair number of native contacts.