Deciphering the timescales and mechanisms of protein folding using minimal off-lattice models

Considerable insights into the mechanisms and timescales of protein folding have been obtained from detailed studies of minimal off-lattice models. These models are coarse-grained representations of polypeptide chains. Many novel predictions of the mechanisms and timescales of the folding of proteins have been made using simulations of off-lattice models. Tree concepts derived from these simulations have been used to analyze the recent experiments and simulations of proteins and peptides.