Computational Protein Design Under a Given Backbone Structure with the ABACUS Statistical Energy Function.

An important objective of computational protein design is to identify amino acid sequences that stably fold into a given backbone structure. A general approach to this problem is to minimize an energy function in the sequence space. We have previously reported a method to derive statistical energies for fixed-backbone protein design and showed that it led to de novo proteins that fold as expected. Here, we present the usage of the program that implements this method, which we now name as ABACUS (A Backbone-based Amino aCid Usage Survey).