Spin glass engineering and the protein folding problem

School of Chemical Sciences, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA.

Abstract

The way in which the three-dimensional structure of a protein is determined by the one dimensional sequence information is a major unsolved problem in modem molecular biology. In my lecture, I will show how some qualitative aspects of protein folding can be understood using ideas from the theory of spin glasses, and I will discuss some approaches to the practical solution of the protein structure prediction problem using associative memory Hamiltonians like those used in neural network theory.