A principle of stepwise maximization in the economy of the RNA folding process has been previously formulated as the principle of sequential minimization of conformational entropy loss (SMEL). This principle leads to a predictive folding algorithm rooted in an “adiabatic ansatz”. In this...

We investigate the relaxation behavior of complex systems endowed with a rugged free energy landscape from a variational perspective. We focus first on the dynamics in generic ultrametric spaces and then we specialize our generic results to a coarse-grained description of RNA folding, where...