Laboratory of Chemical Physics, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, National Institutes of Health, 5 Memorial Dr., Bethesda, MD 20892-0520, USA.
J Mol Biol. 2018 Feb 16;430(4):409-423. doi: 10.1016/j.jmb.2017.05.018. Epub 2017 May 25.
The transition path is a tiny fraction of a molecular trajectory during which the free-energy barrier is crossed. It is a single-molecule property and contains all mechanistic information of folding processes of biomolecules such as proteins and nucleic acids. However, the transition path has been difficult to probe because it is short and rarely visited when transitions actually occur. Recent technical advances in single-molecule spectroscopy have made it possible to directly probe transition paths, which has opened up new theoretical and experimental approaches to investigating folding mechanisms. This article reviews recent single-molecule fluorescence and force spectroscopic measurements of transition path times and their connection to both theory and simulations.
转变路径是分子轨迹中跨越自由能势垒的一小段路径。它是一种单分子性质，包含了蛋白质和核酸等生物分子折叠过程的所有机制信息。然而，由于转变路径很短，而且在实际转变发生时很少被访问，因此一直难以探测。单分子光谱学的最新技术进展使得直接探测转变路径成为可能，这为研究折叠机制开辟了新的理论和实验方法。本文综述了最近关于转变路径时间的单分子荧光和力谱测量及其与理论和模拟的联系。
