A measure on the space of polymer folding pathways: Preliminaries for a new scheme of statistical inference

Abstract

Research to elucidate the cause for the robustness and expediency of biopolymer folding processes calls for a new scheme of statistical inference whereby statistical weights are directly assigned to folding pathways themselves. Such a scheme stands in contrast with traditional methods built upon a Boltzmann measure over conformation space. A rigorous result paving the way for such an approach is presented in this work, where it is proven that an appropriate measure may be defined over the space of folding pathways. Since a space endowed with a measure constitutes an ensemble, this work could be viewed as a starting point to construct a statistical mechanics of folding pathways.