Mean-Field Model for Protein Folding

We consider a model of a protein, in which the contact interaction between any pair of amino-acids along the chemical sequence is a quenched random variable. At high dimension, the model is equivalent to a Potts spin glass. The protein has a folding transition, between a Brownian phase at high temperature and a collapsed glassy phase at low temperature. At low dimensions, this equivalence does not hold, and we propose an approximate solution to the mean-field equations.