Objective: Understanding protein functionality would mean understanding the basics of life. This functionality follows a three-dimensional structure of proteins. Unfortunately till now it is not possible to obtain these structures artificially. This article offers a survey on the use of meta-heuristic methods in context of simplified models of protein folding.
Methods: Tabu search (TS) strategy is one of the most successful meta-heuristics that has been applied for large number of optimization problems. In the paper, the application of TS for finding low energy conformations of proteins in a simplified lattice model has been proposed.
Results: The algorithm has been extensively tested and the tests showed its good performance. It compares well with the other heuristic approaches.
Conclusions: The approach presented is competitive as compared with other methods and due to its low computation time can be used as a complementary tool for an analysis of the three-dimensional protein structures.