Long Proteins with Unique Optimal Foldings in the H-P Model

It is widely accepted that (1) the natural or folded state of proteins is a global energy minimum, and (2) in most cases proteins fold to a unique state determined by their amino acid sequence. The H-P (hydrophobic-hydrophilic) model is a simple combinatorial model designed to answer qualitative questions about the protein folding process. In this paper we consider a problem suggested by Brian Hayes in 1998: what proteins in the two-dimensional H-P model have unique optimal (minimum energy) foldings? In particular, we prove that there are closed chains of monomers (amino acids) with this property for all (even) lengths; and that there are open monomer chains with this property for all lengths divisible by four.Comment: 22 pages, 18 figure

Mean-Field HP Model, Designability and Alpha-Helices in Protein Structures

Analysis of the geometric properties of a mean-field HP model on a square lattice for protein structure shows that structures with large number of switch backs between surface and core sites are chosen favorably by peptides as unique ground states. Global comparison of model (binary) peptide sequences with concatenated (binary) protein sequences listed in the Protein Data Bank and the Dali Domain Dictionary indicates that the highest correlation occurs between model peptides choosing the favored structures and those portions of protein sequences containing alpha-helices.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Safe and Complete Prediction of RNA Secondary Structure

Ribonucleic acid, RNA, is an essential type of molecule for all known forms of life. It is a nucleic acid, like DNA. However, where DNA appears as two complementary strands that join and twist into a double helix structure, RNA has only a single strand. This strand can fold upon itself, pairing complementary bases. The resulting set of base pairs is the RNA secondary structure, also known as folding. It is typical that a prediction algorithm gives a large number of optimal or near-optimal foldings for an RNA sequence. Only in the simplest cases it is possible to manually go through all of these foldings, and in hard cases it is infeasible to even generate the full set of optimal foldings. In fact, we observe that the number of optimal foldings may be exponential in the sequence length, and that some naturally occurring RNA sequences of 2000–3000 bases in length have well over 10^100 optimal foldings, under the model of maximizing the number of base pairs. To help analyze the full set of optimal foldings, we apply the concept of safe and complete algorithms. In the presence of multiple optimal solutions, any partial solution that appears in all optimal solutions is called a safe part, and a safe and complete algorithm finds all of the safe parts. We show a trivial safe and complete algorithm that computes safety by going through the full set of optimal foldings. However, this algorithm is only practical for short RNA sequences that do not have too many optimal foldings. In order to analyze the harder RNA sequences, we develop and implement a novel polynomial-time safe and complete algorithm for RNA secondary structure prediction, using the model of maximizing base pairs. Using the dynamic programming approach, this new algorithm can compute how often each base pair and unpaired base appears in the full set of optimal foldings without having to produce the actual foldings. Our experimental evaluation shows that the safe parts of a folding are more likely to be biologically correct than the non-safe parts. We observe this both by using our implementation of the efficient safe and complete algorithm and by combining an existing predictor program with the trivial algorithm. As this existing predictor uses a modern minimum free energy model for predicting the RNA foldings, tests using this combination show that safety is a useful property, even beyond the simple maximum pairs model in our implementation

A functional programming approach to a computational biology problem

Protein Folding is an important open problem in the eld of Computational Biology Due to its com binatorial nature exact polynomial algorithms to solve it could not exist and so approximation algorithms and heuristics has to be used In this paper a new heuristic is studied based on the approach that considers that the folding process is coded into the protein One important aspect of this work is that the algorithm was implemented using functional programming resulting in advantages for the understanding of the problem The results obtained are comparable with the ones obtained for classical algorithms .Eje: Conferencia latinoamericana de programación funcionalRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

CHAPTER 1 DISCOVERING 3-D PROTEIN STRUCTURES FOR OPTIMAL STRUCTURE ALIGNMENT

Analyzing three dimensional protein structures is a very important task in molecular biology. Nowadays, the solution for protein structures often stems from the use of the state-of-the-art technologies such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy techniques or X-Ray crystallography etc. as seen in the increasing number of PD

Flexible protein folding by ant colony optimization

Protein structure prediction is one of the most challenging topics in bioinformatics. As the protein structure is found to be closely related to its functions, predicting the folding structure of a protein to judge its functions is meaningful to the humanity. This chapter proposes a flexible ant colony (FAC) algorithm for solving protein folding problems (PFPs) based on the hydrophobic-polar (HP) square lattice model. Different from the previous ant algorithms for PFPs, the pheromones in the proposed algorithm are placed on the arcs connecting adjacent squares in the lattice. Such pheromone placement model is similar to the one used in the traveling salesmen problems (TSPs), where pheromones are released on the arcs connecting the cities. Moreover, the collaboration of effective heuristic and pheromone strategies greatly enhances the performance of the algorithm so that the algorithm can achieve good results without local search methods. By testing some benchmark two-dimensional hydrophobic-polar (2D-HP) protein sequences, the performance shows that the proposed algorithm is quite competitive compared with some other well-known methods for solving the same protein folding problems

A new procedure to analyze RNA non-branching structures

RNA structure prediction and structural motifs analysis are challenging tasks in the investigation of RNA function. We propose a novel procedure to detect structural motifs shared between two RNAs (a reference and a target). In particular, we developed two core modules: (i) nbRSSP_extractor, to assign a unique structure to the reference RNA encoded by a set of non-branching structures; (ii) SSD_finder, to detect structural motifs that the target RNA shares with the reference, by means of a new score function that rewards the relative distance of the target non-branching structures compared to the reference ones. We integrated these algorithms with already existing software to reach a coherent pipeline able to perform the following two main tasks: prediction of RNA structures (integration of RNALfold and nbRSSP_extractor) and search for chains of matches (integration of Structator and SSD_finder)

Geometric combinatorics and computational molecular biology: branching polytopes for RNA sequences

Questions in computational molecular biology generate various discrete optimization problems, such as DNA sequence alignment and RNA secondary structure prediction. However, the optimal solutions are fundamentally dependent on the parameters used in the objective functions. The goal of a parametric analysis is to elucidate such dependencies, especially as they pertain to the accuracy and robustness of the optimal solutions. Techniques from geometric combinatorics, including polytopes and their normal fans, have been used previously to give parametric analyses of simple models for DNA sequence alignment and RNA branching configurations. Here, we present a new computational framework, and proof-of-principle results, which give the first complete parametric analysis of the branching portion of the nearest neighbor thermodynamic model for secondary structure prediction for real RNA sequences.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figure