In the initial stages of the oxidative folding of both bovine pancreatic ribonuclease A (RNase A) and a 58-72 fragment thereof from the fully reduced, denatured state, the 65-72 correctly paired disulfide bond forms in preponderance over the incorrectly paired 58-65 disulfide bond. Since both disulfide-bonded loops contain the same number of amino acid residues, the question arises as to whether the native pairing results from interactions within the 58-72 segment that lead to a nativelike structure even in its fully reduced form. To answer this question, the chain buildup procedure, based on ECEPP, including a solvation treatment, was used to generate the low-energy structures for the 58-72 RNase segment, beginning with residue 72 and building back to residue 58; in this fragment, all three Cys residues (at positions 58, 65, and 72) initially exist in the reduced (CysH) state. After the open-chain energy minima of the 65-72 peptide were generated, these conformations were allowed to form the 65-72 disulfide bond, and the energies of the resulting oxidized conformations were reminimized and rehydrated. The global minimum of the loop-closed 65-72 structure and many of the low-lying loop-closed minima could be superimposed on the energy-minimized X-ray structure for residues 65-72. The low-energy structures for the full open chain 58-72 peptide were then computed and were allowed to form disulfide bonds either between residues 65 and 72 (native) or between residues 58 and 65 (non-native), and their energies were reminimized and rehydrated in the loop-closed state. Although the overall fold of the 65-72 loop-closed global minimum was the same as for the energy-minimized X-ray structure of these residues, the overall rms deviation was 3.9 A because of local deviations among residues 58-64. In contrast, the 65-72 segment of the global minimum of the 58-72 fragment could be superimposed on the corresponding residues of the energy-minimized X-ray structure. The lowest-energy structure for the 58-65 non-native paired 58-72 sequence was 6 kcal/mol higher in energy than that for the 58-72 peptide with the 65-72 disulfide bond formed. These results suggest that the native pairing of the 65-72 peptide arises from energetic determinants (adoption of left-handed single-residue conformations by Gly 68, and side chain interactions involving Gln 69) contained within this peptide sequence.