A survey of recent work on evolutionary approaches to the protein folding problem

A problem of immense importance in computational biology is the determination of the functional conformations of protein molecules. With the advent of faster computers, it is now possible to use rules to search conformation space for protein structures that have minimal free energy. The paper surveys work done in the last five years (1994-99) using evolutionary search algorithms to find low energy protein conformations. In particular, a detailed description is included of some work recently started at the National Cancer Institute, which uses evolution strategies.