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Colour

Style

Engine

—

Rg (Å)—

Ends (Å)—

Compact—

Native—

Contacts—

Helix—

Sheet—

Coil—

Secondary structure over time

helix · sheet · coil

Radius, compaction and contacts over time

radius · compaction · contacts

The gallery

9 folds

Yes, it is a butt-dial joke. It will not come up again. No protein folds this way. ButtFold animates a simple physics model relaxing a chain toward a structure it already knows.

What it is, and is notClose

That is not a prediction of an unknown structure and it is not a folding pathway. ESMFold predicts where a real UniProt protein ends up — at Meta, not on this server — and the Gō model then animates a chain collapsing toward that prediction. A prediction can be wrong, so every protein offered has an experimental structure in the PDB to check it against.

The 150 poses in a trajectory are 50,000 integration steps apart, far enough that an atom can move further than the protein is wide between two of them. What you see in between is drawn to join them up, not computed, so the motion is smooth where the model is not. The music is a faithful map of the simulation's events, and nothing more.

Every note is an event in the fold. Nothing is composed and nothing is random: the same protein in the same style gives the same piece, every time.

How the music is madeClose

Two residues touching for the first time is a note. How far apart they are in the chain sets its register, so a local contact sounds high and a long-range one low; a long-range contact between two greasy residues — the core coming together — goes to the bass.

Helix: a sustained pad in stacked fourths
Sheet: a staccato interlocking figure
Coil: arpeggios between the chord tones
How folded one residue is: that note’s velocity
How folded the chain is: the low-pass, the detune and the reverb
Radius of gyration: tempo and register
Converging: a cadence, resolving to the tonic

So a protein that never quite resolves stays a detuned wash for the whole piece, and one that snaps shut accelerates into a cadence. Each note is placed in space where its own residue is, which is worth headphones. A bar holds sixteen contacts at most; when more form than that the surplus is counted and reported under the transport rather than quietly dropped.