Evolving Local Minima in the Protein Energy Surface

Abstract

Proteins are the molecular tools of living cells and the path to unraveling their function is through modeling and understanding their structure. Many diseases occur when a protein loses its intended function due to inability to form the appropriate structure with which it binds to other molecules. A holistic approach to protein modeling would characterize all possible structural states accessible by a protein under native conditions. However, this task is infeasible. The question then becomes, how can we model the subset of these structural states most relevant to the function or disfunction of a protein?