Amino acids pattern-biased spiral search for protein structure prediction

Abstract

Proteins are essentially sequences of amino acids. They adopt specific folded 3-dimensional structures to perform specific tasks. The formation of 3-dimensional structures is largely guided by the constituent amino acids. Therefore, the positional presence of amino acids in a sequence might play important roles during the protein folding process. In this paper, we present a new heuristic derived from the positional patterns of amino acids in a sequence. With the help of a biased tabu tenure, we apply this heuristic within a spiral search algorithm. The spiral search is an efficient algorithm to develop hydrophobic core in a protein structure pulling hydrophobic amino acids towards the core centre in a spiral fashion. On a set of standard benchmark proteins, we experimentally show that applying our new heuristic improves the performance of a spiral search algorithm consistently.