De novo protein structure prediction

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in computational biology, de novo protein structure prediction is the task of estimating a protein's tertiary structure from its sequence alone. The problem is very difficult and has occupied leading scientists for decades. Research has focused in three areas: alternate lower-resolution representations of proteins, accurate energy functions, and efficient sampling methods. At present, the most successful methods have a reasonable probability of predicting the fold of a small protein domain within 5 Angstroms.