Evaluating the peptide structure prediction capabilities of a purely ab-initio method

DEEPSAM is a relatively new global optimization algorithm aimed to predict the structure of bio-molecules from sequence, without any additional preliminary assumption. It is an evolutionary algorithm whose mutation operators are built by hybridizing the diffusion equation method, molecular dynamics simulated annealing, and a quasi-Newton local minimization method. The goal of this study was to evaluate the structure prediction capabilities of DEEPSAM by running it upon NMR structures of linear peptides (10-20 residues). The results indicate that DEEPSAM successfully predicted the conformations of these peptides, using modest computing resources.