title: Evolutionary method for the assembly of rigid protein fragments.
abstract: Genetic algorithms constitute a powerful optimization method that has already been used in the study of the protein folding problem. However, they often suffer from a lack of convergence in a reasonably short time for complex fitness functions. Here, we propose an evolutionary strategy that can reproducibly find structures close to the minimum of a potential function for a simplified protein model in an efficient way. The model reduces the number of degrees of freedom of the system by treating the protein structure as composed of rigid fragments. The search incorporates a double encoding procedure and a merging operation from subpopulations that evolve independently of one another, both contributing to the good performance of the full algorithm. We have tested it with protein structures of different degrees of complexity, and present our conclusions related to its possible application as an efficient tool for the analysis of folding potentials.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Química Física, Facultad de Ciencias Químicas, Universidad Complutense, E-28040 Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: De Sancho
authors.forename: Lidia
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Prieto
authors.forename: Ana M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Rubio
authors.forename: Antonio
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Rey
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D008958:Models, Molecular; D010446:Peptide Fragments / Q000737:chemistry*; D017510:Protein Folding
chemical_list: D010446:Peptide Fragments