In protein folding, a native contact is a contact between the side chains of two amino acids that are not neighboring in the amino acid sequence (i.e., they are more than four residues apart in the primary sequence in order to remove trivial i to i+4 contacts along alpha helices) but are spatially close in the protein's native state tertiary structure.
Native contacts are important for stabilizing the three-dimensional structure of proteins and are a key factor in determining how proteins fold into their functional conformations.