Quantitative protein dynamics from dominant folding pathways.

Characterization of protein folding by dominant reaction pathways.

We assess the reliability of the recently developed approach denominated dominant reaction pathways (DRP) by studying the folding of a 16 residue beta-hairpin, within a coarse-grained Go-type model. We show that the DRP predictions are in quantitative agreement with the results of molecular dynamics simulations performed in the same model. On the other hand, in the DRP approach, the computation...

Stochastic dynamics and dominant protein folding pathways

Complex folding pathways in a simple beta-hairpin.

The determination of the folding mechanisms of proteins is critical to understand the topological change that can propagate Alzheimer and Creutzfeld-Jakobs diseases, among others. The computational community has paid considerable attention to this problem; however, the associated time scale, typically on the order of milliseconds or more, represents a formidable challenge. Ab initio protein fol...

Dominant folding pathways of a WW domain.

We investigate the folding mechanism of the WW domain Fip35 using a realistic atomistic force field by applying the Dominant Reaction Pathways approach. We find evidence for the existence of two folding pathways, which differ by the order of formation of the two hairpins. This result is consistent with the analysis of the experimental data on the folding kinetics of WW domains and with the resu...

Finding dominant transition pathways via global optimization of action

We present a new computational approach, Action-CSA, to sample multiple reaction pathways with fixed initial and final states through global optimization of the Onsager-Machlup action using the conformational space annealing method. This approach successfully samples not only the most dominant pathway but also many other possible paths without initial guesses on reaction pathways. Pathway space...