Optimizing an Empirical Scoring Function for Transmembrane Protein Structure Determination

We examine the problem of transmembrane protein structure determination. Like many questions that arise in biological research, this problem cannot be addressed generally by traditional laboratory experimentation alone. Instead, an approach that integrates experiment and computation is required. We formulate the transmembrane protein structure determination problem as a bound-constrained optimization problem using a special empirical scoring function, called Bundler, as the objective function. In this paper, we describe the optimization problem and its mathematical properties, and we examine results obtained using two different derivative-free optimization algorithms.