Detailing Protein Landscapes under Pressure.

Natural protein molecules are remarkable physical objects. Despite the astronomical number of competing structural forms, these systems self-organize into beautiful structural ensembles in biologically short timescales, puzzling out the feat of specifically bringing together thousands of atoms interacting by a myriad of weak forces. Moreover, most protein domains appear to fold with ease in a deceptively simple two-state manner, populating either the fully folded or fully unfolded ensembles. This is certainly not a property of random amino acid chains…how do proteins do it?