An FPGA design for evaluating score function in protein energy calculation

Rosetta method predicts the tertiary structure of proteins, which is important for determining protein function in an organism. It generates a great number of tridimensional protein conformations for a target sequence of amino acids. Its goal is to find the structure with the lowest free energy for the target sequence. The function that evaluates the free energy of the conformations is computationally intensive. We present here a method for evaluating Rosetta scoring function using reconfigurable computing in order to accelerate the execution of the algorithm.