title: Folding Lennard-Jones proteins by a contact potential.
abstract: We studied the possibility to approximate a Lennard-Jones interaction by a pairwise contact potential. First we used a Lennard-Jones potential to design off-lattice, protein-like heteropolymer sequences, whose lowest energy (native) conformations were then identified by molecular dynamics. Then we turned to investigate whether one can find a pairwise contact potential, whose ground states are the contact maps associated with these native conformations. We show that such a requirement cannot be satisfied exactly, i.e., no such contact parameters exist. Nevertheless, we found that one can find contact energy parameters for which an energy minimization procedure, acting in the space of contact maps, yields maps whose corresponding structures are close to the native ones. Finally, we show that when these structures are used as the initial point of a molecular dynamics energy minimization process, the correct native folds are recovered with high probability.
authors.affiliation: International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) and Istituto Nazionale di Fiscia della Materia, Trieste, Italy. cecilia@curio.ucsd.edu
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Clementi
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Vendruscolo
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Maritan
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Domany
mesh_terms: D015195:Drug Design; D008956:Models, Chemical; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D011487:Protein Conformation; D017510:Protein Folding; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry*; D013816:Thermodynamics
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins