A new way to recognize downhill folding based on generalized path length

Abstract

The protein folding is an important scientific problem and many methods were designed to elucidate the protein folding and obtain insight into the molecular mechanism. A novel means is presented to identify the downhill pathways of protein folding in this paper. This method is based on barrier energy profile projected onto the generalized path length (GPL) with Breadth-first searching (BFS) algorithm. We show the effectiveness of this approach by constructing the barrier energy profile of trpzip2 and comparing with other methods.