Toward Identification of the reaction coordinate directly from the transition state ensemble using the kernel PCA method.

We propose a new method for analyzing an ensemble of transition states to extract components of the reaction coordinate. We use the kernel principal component analysis (kPCA), which is a generalization of the ordinary PCA that does not make a linearization approximation We applied this method to a TPS study of human LDH we had previously published [Quaytman, S.; Schwartz, S. D. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.2007, 104, 12253] and extracted a reasonable representation for the reaction coordinate.