A protein folding model using genetic algorithms

Abstract

Understanding how proteins fold and predicting their structure is one of the most important open problems in biology with very significant implications in various fields of science including molecular biology, biochemistry and genetics. Determining the structure of a protein is usually the result of long laborious laboratory analysis which makes use of techniques such as X-Ray diffraction and spectroscopy - but these do not provide information on the actual folding process itself and cannot be called prediction methods. The completion of the human genome project in April 2003 has provided us with a great deal of data regarding the chemical composition of proteins but the task of determining the structure of these proteins lags far behind.