Acceleration of Reactivation of Reduced Bovine Pancreatic Ribonuclease by a Microsomal System from Rat Liver

Prior studies to this article by Anfinsen, Epstein, and Goldberger established that the time required for synthesizing a chain of protein such as ribonuclease in the tissues of higher organisms would be approximately two minutes. Here, the three researchers noted that an enzyme system in the endoplasmic reticulum of cells that catalyzed the disulfide interchange reaction and which, when added to solutions of reduced ribonuclease, catalyzed the rapid formation of the native disulfide pairing in a period less than two minutes. Subsequent studies would find that such motile proteins as staphylococcal nuclease or myoglobin could undergo virtually complete renaturation in only a few seconds or less.