Protein folding : can high-performance computing improve our understanding?

Proteins are complex physical systems of great biological and pharmaceutical interest. Computer simulations can be useful to understand how they fold to their biologically active conformation, but have to face two problems, namely the roughness of the energy landscape and the wide range of time scales associated with the folding process. Models at atomic detail are able to describe the protein with a high degree of realism, but are computationally very demanding and their results usually are difficult to analyse. Models with simplified degrees of freedom are less accurate but are good at highlighting the basic physical mechanism which controls protein dynamics. A combination of the two can be the right solution to the protein folding problem.