Simplified chain folding models as metaheuristic benchmark for tuning real protein folding algorithms?

Lattice-bound folding models are often used by computer scientists as a simplified instance of the chain folding problem (featuring, at the other end of the complexity spectrum, conformational sampling of biologically important molecules). Lattice-bound folding is relatively fast, thus well suited for benchmarking of nature-inspired optimization heuristics. Yet, it is not clear whether the benchmark-winning heuristics are necessarily the best suited for the more complex problems of atom-level resolution conformational sampling. This paper reports the design of - as far as possible - equivalent evolutionary operators and algorithms, for both chains and molecules, to explicitly check whether chain folding may serve as “training ground” for real sampling protocols.