ABSTRACT
The tertiary structure of the proteins determines their functions. Therefore, the predicting of protein's tertiary structure, based on the primary amino acid sequence from long time, is the most important and challenging subject in biochemistry, molecular biology, and biophysics. One of the most popular protein structure prediction methods, called Hydrophobic-Polar (HP) model, is based on the observation that in polar environment hydrophobic amino acids are in the core of the molecule-in contact between them and more polar amino acids are in contact with the polar environment. In this study, we present a new mixed integer programming formulation, exact algorithm, and two heuristic algorithms to solve the protein folding problem stated as a combinatorial optimization problem in a simple cubic lattice. The results from computational runs on a set of benchmarks are favorably compared to known algorithms for solving the 3D lattice HP model as genetic algorithms, ant colony optimization algorithm, and Monte Carlo algorithm.
Subject(s)
Amino Acids/chemistry , Computational Biology/methods , Proteins/chemistry , Algorithms , Amino Acid Sequence , Hydrophobic and Hydrophilic Interactions , Models, Molecular , Monte Carlo Method , Protein Conformation , Protein Folding , Protein Structure, TertiaryABSTRACT
This article presents an efficient heuristic for protein folding. The protein folding problem is to predict the compact three-dimensional structure of a protein based on its amino acid sequence. The focus is on an original integer programming model derived from a platform used for Contact Map Overlap problem.
Subject(s)
Algorithms , Computational Biology/methods , Heuristics , Models, Theoretical , Protein Folding , Proteins/chemistry , Computer Simulation , Hydrophobic and Hydrophilic Interactions , Protein ConformationABSTRACT
Among the measures for quantifying the similarity between three-dimensional (3D) protein structures, maximum contact map overlap (CMO) received sustained attention during the past decade. Despite this, the known algorithms exhibit modest performance and are not applicable for large-scale comparison. This article offers a clear advance in this respect. We present a new integer programming model for CMO and propose an exact branch-and-bound algorithm with bounds obtained by a novel Lagrangian relaxation. The efficiency of the approach is demonstrated on a popular small benchmark (Skolnick set, 40 domains). On this set, our algorithm significantly outperforms the best existing exact algorithms. Many hard CMO instances have been solved for the first time. To further assess our approach, we constructed a large-scale set of 300 protein domains. Computing the similarity measure for any of the 44850 pairs, we obtained a classification in excellent agreement with SCOP. Supplementary Material is available at www.liebertonline.com/cmb.
