Title: The Peptide Folding Landscape

Description: This print was part of an exhibition in the President's Gallery titled "No Art : Art Show" and was donated to the permanent collection at the close of the show. The following description accompanied the image on a label:

Peptides are small chains of amino acids, and like their longer cousins, proteins, they can fold into well-defined three-dimensional structures. This illustration is meant to represent the concept of a folding free-energy landscape, which is an arrangement of the many different conformations that a peptide can adopt in space, in which similar conformations are placed close to one another. In this conceptual view, the energy of each conformational state is represented as the height of that point in the landscape, with the folded state occupying the lowest point in the landscape since it is the most stable conformation (i.e. the conformation with the lowest energy). Where the number of conformations that any given protein can adopt is astronomical, small peptides (and particularly peptide macrocycles, which have their ends joined) are much more constrained, and recently-developed computational methods allow exhaustive or near-exhaustive exploration of the accessible conformations to predict the lowest-energy state. This illustration was made following the acceptance of Hosseinzadeh, Bhardwaj, Mulligan et al. (2017) Science 358(6369):1461-6 for publication, a paper in which we presented new computational methods for designing peptides that fold and predicting how peptides fold.