Science

paper

Force-Clamp Spectroscopy Monitors the Folding Trajectory of a Single Protein
Julio M. Fernandez* and Hongbin Li
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/303/5664/1674

Ubiquitine protein is stretched and released with AFM to see the unfolding and folding processes. Folding follows roughly 3 stages: 1. fast secondory structure formation, 2. Large fluctuation of contour length, 3. rapid folding to energy minimum.
This method might be useful to track the detail of the protein folding.