What can we learn about protein folding from Ising-like models?

Ising-like models have been remarkably successful in reproducing all the experimental data available on the equilibrium and kinetics of secondary structure formation in short peptides. Over the past two years, very similar models have been used to predict the folding of complete proteins, with encouraging results. Although Ising-like models are probably too simple to describe all aspects of protein folding, the results obtained so far indicate that they can play a critical role in the study of protein folding by bridging the gap between experiment and more detailed theoretical approaches.