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Adaptive sampling is a technique used in computational molecular biology to efficiently simulate protein folding when coupled with molecular dynamics simulations. Proteins spend a large portion – nearly 96% in some cases – of their folding time "waiting" in various thermodynamic free energy minima. Consequently, a straightforward simulation of this process would spend a great deal of computation to this state, with the transitions between the states – the aspects of protein folding of greater scientific interest – taking place only rarely.
In the physical sciences, a particle (or corpuscule in older texts) is a small localized object which can be described by several physical or chemical properties, such as volume, density, or mass. They vary greatly in size or quantity, from subatomic particles like the electron, to microscopic particles like atoms and molecules, to macroscopic particles like powders and other granular materials. Particles can also be used to create scientific models of even larger objects depending on their density, such as humans moving in a crowd or celestial bodies in motion.