Extended Data Fig. 3: Relative Contact Order (RCO) plotted against sequence length of de novo designed and natural proteins.

Both RCO and sequence length describe the complexity of a protein (see Methods). This metric quantifies the number of contacts in a protein structure dependent on the sequence separation in order to capture the nonlocality in sequence of those contacts. a, Curated set of structures from computationally designed proteins reported by Verkuil et al. ³⁴ and Woolfson⁶⁹ (shown in circles) were compared to the design targets in this paper (shown in crosses). This assessment shows that many of the designed topologies show high contact orders relative to other computationally designed proteins previously reported. Symbols are colored according to b, Comparison with natural folds shows that in general native proteins have higher contact orders then computationally designed proteins.