Francesco Rao: "Rethinking molecular kinetics"

Francesco Rao
FRIAS School of Soft Matter Research

Rethinking molecular kinetics

Molecular kinetics allows an atomistic understanding of microscopic processes. The classical picture postulates the existence of a suitable reaction coordinate, disentangling the reactant, the product and the activation energy to observe the transition between them. In most real cases however, it is difficult to choose such a coordinate because of the very large number of states involved as well as the presence of kinetically relevant hidden coordinates (like in protein conformational changes). For this reason, new tools inspired by the fields of complex systems and statistical mechanics have emerged as new candidates for a better understanding of molecular kinetics. Being the large number of degrees of freedom naturally included in the description, this approach provide an unbiased, quantitative way to describe the dynamics of molecular systems.