Multiple time scales for dispersive kinetics in early events of peptide folding

Early events involving local collapse and helix formation manifested by the disulphide recombination of a de-novo peptide, over the time scale from 1 ps to 10 μs, are shown to fit equally well to a stretched exponential (α=0.086±0.003) and by an asymptotic power-law decay (β=0.331±0.004). For inhomogeneous recombination kinetics each decay pattern leads to a different distribution of relaxation times.