A New Efficient Conformational Search Method for ab initio Protein Folding Study: Window Growth Evolutionary Algorithm

초록

A new conformational search method, WGEA (window growth evolutionary algorithm), is described. In this method, a trial conformation is selected or rejected on the basis of the energy of a selected window of w consecutive residues only; interactions between residues beyond the selected window are ignored. The position of the window is selected randomly in a Monte-Carlo procedure. The window size w is changed slowly, from a minimum of 6 to the full length of the protein. An ensemble of structures is generated at each window size from which a fixed number of conformations are selected to be used as seed conformations for the next window size. When the root-mean-square (RMS) deviation from the experimental structure is used as the energy function and six discrete dihedral angle states are used for each residue to describe the protein conformation, WGEA efficiently refolds 14 model proteins within C RMS deviation of 1.2-2.8 angstrom.

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