A Coarse-Grained approach to protein design: Learning from design to understand folding

Abstract

Computational studies have given a great contribution in building our current understanding of the complex behavior of protein molecules; nevertheless, a complete characterization of their free energy landscape still represents a major challenge. Here, we introduce a new coarse-grained approach that allows for an extensive sampling of the conformational space of a large number of sequences. We explicitly discuss its application in protein design, and by studying four representative proteins, we show that the method generates sequences with a relatively smooth free energy surface directed towards the target structures. © 2011 Ivan Coluzza.