Computer simulations of globular protein folding and tertiary structure.

In summary, although a large number of disparate techniques have been applied to predict the tertiary structure of globular proteins from their amino acid sequence, the solution is not yet at hand. Methodologies for predicting the conformation of constrained, small protein fragments appear to be successful. As the size of the system increases, the level of detail of the treatment decreases; approaches that employ very detailed potentials appear to be limited to about 30-40 residues. Although this is a major advance, methods that reduce the effective number of degrees of freedom are clearly required. Lattice representations coupled to highly efficient Monte Carlo procedures appear to be one such approach. Thus, although a number of theoretical advances in the computer simulation of globular protein structure have been made, much work remains to be done before the globular protein folding problem is solved.