An Efficient Approach for Solving Protein Folding Problem

Abstract

The protein folding problem, is a major problem considering the disastrous after effect of the very vital natural phenomena of folding, going faulty. The solution to the problem categorically involves- evolution, folding and designing of the proteins. More precisely the solution could aim at- (i) prediction of the 3D structure from the primary amino acid sequence, (ii) tracing the misfoldings or the missense protein folding, (iii) designing the novel folds. The protein structure prediction, classification and recognition methods are basically categorized as the template based and template free methods. The classification and recognition related techniques primarily fall under the template-based category, as they use already existing templates, the homologues or family-related information of the proteins; whereas the prediction related approaches could be either template based or template-free, i.e. while prediction, the templates could be referred or not. The template free techniques (Ab-Initio or De-Novo) are widely popular in prediction and designing of the protein structures through substitutions, as they are highly reliable for the detailed study of the protein behavior. newlineWith the continuous analysis of the behavior of proteins, the various physico-chemical properties have also been exposed, right from the synthesis to the functionally stable structure, which formed the foundation of various folding and stability related concepts. These concepts formed the base of various experimental techniques and computational methods, which used variety of physical and mathematical based algorithms/techniques. From the conventional techniques like X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy, to the most recent Soft Computing approaches, all utilized this evolved knowledge. As long as the details of the protein structure and its functional behavior is concerned, the conventional in-vitro techniques are still considered more reliable, but since they are highly time consuming, the need for more feasible techniques prevailed.