Dual individual distributed genetic algorithm for minimizing the energy of protein tertiary structure

This paper describes genetic algorithm (GA) for minimizing the energy of protein tertiary structure. In the conventional study, simulated annealing (SA) is used to be applied for this problem. In the previous studies, it is also reported that it is difficult to find the optimum solutions by GAs. Dual individual distributed genetic algorithm (dual DGA) is one of DGAs and is good at global search. The dual DGA also maintains the diversity of the solutions. Therefore, it can be supposed that they can get a good solution in energy minimization of protein tertiary structure. In this study, Dual DGA is applied to protein tertiary structure. The target protein in this paper is met-enkephalin that consists of 5 amino acids sequences. The results show that dual DGA has the higher searching capability than SA.