Monte Carlo procedure for protein design

A method for sequence optimization in protein models is presented. The approach, which has inherited its basic philosophy from recent work by Deutsch and Kurosky [Phys. Rev. Lett. 76, 323 (1996)] by maximizing conditional probabilities rather than minimizing energy functions, is based upon a different and very efficient multisequence Monte Carlo scheme. By construction, the method ensures that the designed sequences represent good folders thermodynamically. A bootstrap procedure for the sequence space search is devised making very large chains feasible. The algorithm is successfully explored on the two-dimensional HP model [K. F. Lau and K. A. Dill, Macromolecules 32, 3986 (1989)] with chain lengths N= 16, 18, and 32