Construction of effective free energy landscape from single-molecule time series.

A scheme for extracting an effective free energy landscape from single-molecule time series is presented. This procedure uniquely identifies a non-Gaussian distribution of the observable associated with each local equilibrium state (LES). Both the number of LESs and the shape of the non-Gaussian distributions depend on the time scale of observation. By assessing how often the system visits and resides in a chosen LES and escapes from one LES to another (with checking whether the local detailed balance is satisfied), our scheme naturally leads to an effective free energy landscape whose topography depends on in which time scale the system experiences the underlying landscape. For example, two metastable states are unified as one if the time scale of observation is longer than the escape time scale for which the system can visit mutually these two states. As an illustrative example, we present the application of extracting the effective free energy landscapes from time series of the end-to-end distance of a three-color, 46-bead model protein. It indicates that the time scales to attain the local equilibrium tend to be longer in the unfolded state than those in the compact collapsed state.