Reply to Comment on "Criterion that Determines the Foldability of Proteins"

Abstract

We point out that the correlation between folding times and $\sigma = (T_{\theta } - T_{f})/T_{\theta }$ in protein-like heteropolymer models where $T_{\theta }$ and $T_{f}$ are the collapse and folding transition temperatures was already established in 1993 before the other presumed equivalent criterion (folding times correlating with $T_{f}$ alone) was suggested. We argue that the folding times for these models show no useful correlation with the energy gap even if restricted to the ensemble of compact structures as suggested by Karplus and Shakhnovich (cond-mat/9606037).