Long-time protein folding dynamics from short-time molecular dynamics simulations

Protein folding involves physical timescales - microseconds to seconds - that are too long to be studied directly by straightforward molecular dynamics simulation, where the fundamental timestep is constrained to femtoseconds. Here we show how the long-time statistical dynamics of a simple solvated biomolecular system can be well described by a discrete-state Markov chain model constructed from trajectories that are an order of magnitude shorter than the longest relaxation times of the system. This suggests that such models, appropriately constructed from short molecular dynamics simulations, may have utility in the study of long-time conformational dynamics.