Biophysicists at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), Germany, have published the results of single-molecule experiments that bring a higher-resolution tool to the study of protein folding. How proteins arrive at the three-dimensional shapes that determine their essential functions - or cause grave diseases when folding goes wrong - is considered one of the most important and least understood questions in the biological and medical sciences. Folding itself follows a path determined by its energy landscape, a complex property described in unprecedented detail by the TUM researchers.