Determination of the structure of the energy landscape for coarse-grained off-lattice models of folding heteropolymers

The structure of energy landscapes for a minimalist coarse-grained off-lattice protein model is presented to investigate the folding behaviors of heteropolymers. The obtained energy landscapes serve as a useful tool for visualization of the funnel-like structure of a considered system in the configuration space. Despite the simplicity of the model, the knowledge of the free-energy landscape enables us to show different folding characteristics known from real proteins and synthetic peptides, such as two-state folding and metastability.