title: Protein folding by motion planning.
abstract: We investigate a novel approach for studying protein folding that has evolved from robotics motion planning techniques called probabilistic roadmap methods (PRMs). Our focus is to study issues related to the folding process, such as the formation of secondary and tertiary structures, assuming we know the native fold. A feature of our PRM-based framework is that the large sets of folding pathways in the roadmaps it produces, in just a few hours on a desktop PC, provide global information about the protein's energy landscape. This is an advantage over other simulation methods such as molecular dynamics or Monte Carlo methods which require more computation and produce only a single trajectory in each run. In our initial studies, we obtained encouraging results for several small proteins. In this paper, we investigate more sophisticated techniques for analyzing the folding pathways in our roadmaps. In addition to more formally revalidating our previous results, we present a case study showing that our technique captures known folding differences between the structurally similar proteins G and L.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-3112, USA.
authors.forename: Shawna
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Thomas
authors.forename: Guang
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Song
authors.forename: Nancy M
authors.initials: NM
authors.lastname: Amato
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001703:Biophysics / Q000379:methods*; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D008954:Models, Biological; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009010:Monte Carlo Method; D009038:Motion; D011336:Probability; D011487:Protein Conformation; D017510:Protein Folding; D017433:Protein Structure, Secondary; D012984:Software; D013816:Thermodynamics