COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO THE PROTEIN FOLDING PROBLEM
Professor David Jones, Department of Biological Sciences, Brunel University

Abstract: The so-called "protein folding problem" is the biggest of the remaining challenges in molecular biology. The puzzle as to how the complex 3-D structure of a protein is encoded purely by its amino acid sequence is being tackled by both experimentalists and theoreticians alike. Although a full understanding of how proteins self-assemble into their native structures is a long way off, a more tractable sub-problem is the challenge of programming a computer to predict the structure of a given protein from its sequence. In computational terms, the protein folding problem can be described as a "black box" into which a string of 20 different letters is fed and a set of X,Y,Z coordinates for each atom in the protein produced as the output. In this talk, I will review some of the work from my own group in developing different protein folding "black boxes", and also briefly look to the future, including some discussion of the "Blue Gene" project in which IBM plan to build the World's most powerful supercomputer to crack the protein folding problem.

This seminar was held at the Department of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London on 20 November 2000.

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