TA-PFP: A Transgenetic Algorithm to Solve the Protein Folding Problem

This work reports the application of a transgenetic algorithm to the protein folding problem in the 3D HP model, which is a particular instance of the string folding problem and is known to be NP-hard. The proposed algorithm uses two kinds of plasmids, two kinds of transposons, two information sources, adaptation of parameters and is hybridized with tabu search. The computational experiments consider seven instances of the Tortilla benchmark. The results are favorably comparable with that reported in the literature, attesting the efficiency of the methodology.