Evolutionary algorithms for the inverse protein folding problem

Abstract

Protein structure prediction is an essential step in understanding the molecular mechanisms of living cells with widespread application in biotechnology and health. The inverse folding problem (IFP) of finding sequences that fold into a defined structure is in itself an important research problem at the heart of rational protein design. In this chapter, a multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) using the diversity-as-objective (DAO) variant of multi-objectivization is presented, which optimizes the secondary structure similarity and the sequence diversity at the same time and hence searches deeper in the sequence solution space. To validate the final optimization results, a subset of the best sequences was selected for tertiary structure prediction. Comparing secondary structure annotation and tertiary structure of the predicted model to the original protein structure demonstrates that relying on fast approximation during the optimization process permits to obtain meaningful sequences.