Determination of protein structure and dynamics combining immune algorithms and pattern search methods

Natural proteins quickly fold into a complicated three-dimensional structure. Evolutionary algorithms have been used to predict the native structure with the lowest energy conformation of the primary sequence of a given protein. Successful structure prediction requires a free energy function sufficiently close to the true potential for the native state, as well as a method for exploring the conformational space. Protein structure prediction is a challenging problem because current potential functions have limited accuracy and the conformational space is vast. In this work, we show an innovative approach to the protein folding (PF) problem based on an hybrid Immune Algorithm (IMMALG) and a quasi-Newton method starting from a population of promising protein conformations created by the global optimizer DIRECT. The new method has been tested on Met-Enkephelin peptide, which is a paradigmatic example of multiple–minima problem, 1POLY, 1ROP and the three helix protein 1BDC. DIRECT produces an initial population of promising candidate solutions within a potentially optimal rectangle for the funnel landscape of the PF problem. Hence, IMMALG starts from a population of promising protein conformations created by the global optimizer DIRECT. The experimental results show that such a multistage approach is a competitive and effective search method in the conformational search space of real proteins, in terms of solution quality and computational cost comparing the results of the current state-of-art algorithms.