Characterizing Protein Conformation Space

Abstract

In this work, we propose a radical approach for exploring the space of all possible protein structures. We present techniques to explore the clash-free conformation space, which comprises all protein structures whose atoms are not in self-collision. Unlike energy based methods, this approach allows efficient exploration and remains general -- the benefits of characterization of the space apply to all proteins. We hypothesize that this conformation space branches into many small funnels as we sample compact conformations. We develop a compact representation the conformation space, and give experimental results that support our hypothesis. Potential applications of our method include protein folding as well as observing structural relationships between proteins.