The following function was designed in our group to predict the folding rate constant based on an elastic view of the protein folding process.
Where the first term consider the internal free energy of the protein comprising the configurational entropy, close-packing interactions and torsion potential contributions. The second term is the logarithms of the protein chain length and the third is the logarithms of the sum of the folding degree for each residue. This third term is taken as a measure of the deformation of the protein chain along folding.
For more information see: DGc, DGcp, DGtor and FD