Application of tabu search strategy for finding low energy structure of protein.
OBJECTIVE
Understanding protein functionality would mean understanding the basics of life. This functionality follows a three-dimensional structure of proteins. Unfortunately till now it is not possible to obtain these structures artificially. This article offers a survey on the use of meta-heuristic methods in context of simplified models of protein folding.


METHODS
Tabu search (TS) strategy is one of the most successful meta-heuristics that has been applied for large number of optimization problems. In the paper, the application of TS for finding low energy conformations of proteins in a simplified lattice model has been proposed.


RESULTS
The algorithm has been extensively tested and the tests showed its good performance. It compares well with the other heuristic approaches.


CONCLUSIONS
The approach presented is competitive as compared with other methods and due to its low computation time can be used as a complementary tool for an analysis of the three-dimensional protein structures.
Błazewicz
Jacek
J
Institute of Computing Science, Poznań University of Technology, Piotrowo 3a, 60-965 Poznań, Poland.
Lukasiak
Piotr
P
Miłostan
Maciej
M
D000465:Algorithms; D008958:Models, Molecular; D011487:Protein Conformation; D016415:Sequence Alignment / Q000379:methods; D020539:Sequence Analysis, Protein / Q000379:methods*