Multiple time scales for dispersive kinetics in early events of peptide folding

Early events involving local collapse and helix formation manifested by the disulphide recombination of a de-novo peptide, over the time scale from 1 ps to 10 mu s, are shown to fit equally well to a stretched exponential (alpha = 0.086 +/- 0.003) and by an asymptotic power-law decay (beta = 0.331 +/- 0.004). For inhomogeneous recombination kinetics each decay pattern leads to a different distribution of relaxation times. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.