Combining Machine Learning and Optimization Techniques to Determine 3-D Structures of Polypeptides

One of the main research problems in Structural Bioinformatics is the analysis and prediction of three-dimensional structures (3-D) of polypeptides or proteins. The 1990’s Genome projects resulted in a large increase in the number of protein sequences. However, the number of identified 3-D protein structures has not followed the same trend.The determination of protein structure is experimentally expensive and time consuming. This makes scientists largely dependent on computational methods that can predict correct 3-D protein structures only from extended and full amino acid sequences. Several computational methodologies and algorithms have been proposed as a solution to the Protein Structure Prediction (PSP) problem. We briefly describe the AI techniques we have been used to tackle this problem.