Application of tabu search strategy for finding low energy structure of protein.

Abstract

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