Protein dynamics and function: Insights from the energy landscape and solvent slaving

Protein motions are complex and a good way to describe them is in terms of a very high- dimensional conformation space. We give here a simple explanation of the conformation space and the energy landscape, the conformational motions and protein reactions, based on an analogy to a traffic problem. The analogy provides insight into the slaving of protein processes to bulk solvent. fluctuations, in both the native and unfolded states.