Normal mode
At the molecular level, many biological phenomena, such as catalytic activity of an enzyme, occur within the range of nano- to millisecond timescales. All atom simulation techniques, such as molecular dynamics simulations, rarely reach microsecond trajectory length, depending on the size of the system and accessible computational resources. Normal mode analysis in the context of GNM, or elastic network (EN) models in general, provides insights on the longer-scale functional dynamic behaviors of macromolecules. Here, the model captures native state functional motions of a biomolecule at the cost of atomic detail. The inference obtained from this model is complementary to atomic detail simulation techniques.