Protein Folding Algorithms

Proteins are the macromolecules responsible for most of life's physical and chemical activities. Proteins are linear polymers whose covalent structure can be described by a sequence -- typically 50 - 500 characters long -- from a 20-letter alphabet. Upon synthesis, proteins spontaneously self-assemble into intricately folded three-dimensional structures. I will describe recent progress in predicting protein structure from sequence using large-scale conformational sampling and high-performance computing.