The folding funnel landscape for the peptide Met-enkephalin

Abstract

We study the free energy landscape of the small peptide Met-enkephalin. Our data were obtained from a generalized-ensemble Monte Carlo simulation taking the interactions among all atoms into account. We show that the free energy landscape resembles that of a funnel, indicating that this peptide is a good folder. Our work demonstrates that the energy landscape picture and folding concept, developed in the context of simplified protein models, can also be used to describe the folding in more realistic models.