Cuckoo search algorithm and its application for secondary protein structure prediction

Protein structure prediction (PSP) is one of the most challenging problems in the field of structural bioinformatics. Determining native conformation of a protein can affect its functions and plays an important role in drug design and disease prediction. Therefore, researchers are trying to come up with different techniques in order to find more precise structures. This study investigates application of cuckoo search (CS) algorithm on the protein folding problem based on AB off-lattice model. Experiments are conducted on a set of protein sequences that are suggested in the literature. For the purpose of evaluation, we used state-of-the-art and recently developed algorithms. Comparison of the statistical results demonstrates that CS outperforms other algorithms in a meaningful way.