Biophys J, March 2002, p. 1123-1132, Vol. 82, No. 3

New Stochastic Strategy to Analyze Helix Folding

M. A. Moret,^* P. M. Bisch, K. C. Mundim, and P. G. Pascutti

 ^*Departamento de Física, Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana, Feira de Santana,  Instituto de Biofísica Carlos Chagas Filho, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, and  Instituto de Química, Universidade de Brasília, Brasília, Brazil

We propose an alternative stochastic strategy to search secondary structures based on the generalized simulated annealing (GSA) algorithm, by using conformational preferences based on the Ramachandran map. We optimize the search for polypeptide conformational space and apply to peptides considered to be good -helix promoters above a critical number of residues. Our strategy to obtain conformational energies consist in coupling a classical force field (THOR package) with the GSA procedure, biasing the  ×  backbone angles to the allowed regions in the Ramachandran map. For polyalanines we obtained stable -helix structures when the number of residues were equal or exceeded 13 amino acids residues. We also observed that the energy gap between the global minimum and the first local minimum tends to increase with the polypeptide size. These conformations were generated by performing 2880 stochastic molecular optimizations with a continuum medium approach. When compared with molecular dynamics or Monte Carlo methods, GSA can be considered the fastest.

Biophys J, March 2002, p. 1123-1132, Vol. 82, No. 3
© 2002 by the Biophysical Society   0006-3495/02/03/1123/10  $2.00

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