Fig. 3.
Energy and free-energy surfaces for I27-I27 at its folding temperature. Nself and Nswap are the number of self-recognition contacts and the number of domain-swapped contacts, respectively. The trapped states I have higher energies than the native states N, as shown in the z axis, but have similar free energies to those of the native states, as shown by the color coding of the free energy, with scale indicated in the side bar. We see that the ensemble I states are entropically favored. As temperature increases, the intermediate ensemble will become more stable than the native ensemble.