Performance comparison of ab initio protein structure prediction methods.

Wet Lab methods used to resolve the native structure of a given protein such as X-ray Diffraction and NMR spectroscopy are time-consuming, expensive, and could be done multiple times due to failure. Those pitfalls led to the development of computationally automated prediction methods. Predicting the structure of a protein using its peptide sequence only — also known as ab initio Protein Structure Prediction "PSP"— is computationally challenging because of the large conformational space to be searched and the complexity of energy functions. Some successful predictive methods have been developed to solve PSP problem. In this paper, by using a set of peptide sequences, we compare a collection of PSP ab initio-based methods. Experiments show that using a metaheuristic-based search method that utilizes genetic algorithm can achieve same or better results than time consuming methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]