Protein Folding as a Problem of Global Optimization
Ken A. Dill
Professor, Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Biochemistry/Biophysics, and Biopharmaceutics; Associate Dean, School of Pharmacy, UCSF
Abstract: An important problem in biology and for drug discovery is the prediction of a protein's
3-dimensional structure from its amino acid sequence. This is a problem of global optimization, a search for the single optimal conformation in a search space that grows exponentially with the number of degrees of freedom. Our approach has been to utilize insights from various sources: (1) from computational linguistics, and (2) from the physics of how proteins fold, for example, to construct more efficient search algorithms.