Calculation of protein conformation by global optimization of a potential energy function
Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 18, 2026

Protein WISDOM: A Workbench for In silico De novo Design of BioMolecules
Published on: July 25, 2013
1Baker Laboratory of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853-1301, USA.
Abstract:
A novel hierarchical approach to protein folding has been applied to compute the unknown structures of seven target proteins provided by CASP3. The approach is based exclusively on the global optimization of a potential energy function for a united-residue model by conformational space annealing, followed by energy refinement using an all-atom potential. Comparison of the submitted models for five globular proteins with the experimental structures shows that the conformations of large fragments (approximately 60 aa) were predicted with rmsds of 4.2-6.8 A for the C alpha atoms. Our lowest-energy models for targets T0056 and T0061 were particularly successful, producing the correct fold of approximately 52% and 80% of the structures, respectively. These results support the thermodynamic hypothesis that protein structure can be computed solely by global optimization of a potential energy function for a given amino acid sequence.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
Protein Organization
The primary structure of a protein is its amino acid sequence.
Protein Organization
Protein Folding
Protein Structure Is Critical to Its Biological Function
Proteins perform a wide range of biological functions such as catalyzing chemical reactions, providing...
Protein Folding
Protein Folding
Conservation of Protein Domains Over Different Proteins
A limited set of protein domains often duplicate and recombine during evolution. These domains can be organized in different combinations to form...

