Protein folding and phylogenetic tree reconstruction using stochastic approximation Monte Carlo

Date

2007-09-17

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Publisher

Texas A&M University

Abstract

Recently, the stochastic approximation Monte Carlo algorithm has been proposed by Liang et al. (2005) as a general-purpose stochastic optimization and simulation algorithm. An annealing version of this algorithm was developed for real small protein folding problems. The numerical results indicate that it outperforms simulated annealing and conventional Monte Carlo algorithms as a stochastic optimization algorithm. We also propose one method for the use of secondary structures in protein folding. The predicted protein structures are rather close to the true structures. Phylogenetic trees have been used in biology for a long time to graphically represent evolutionary relationships among species and genes. An understanding of evolutionary relationships is critical to appropriate interpretation of bioinformatics results. The use of the sequential structure of phylogenetic trees in conjunction with stochastic approximation Monte Carlo was developed for phylogenetic tree reconstruction. The numerical results indicate that it has a capability of escaping from local traps and achieving a much faster convergence to the global likelihood maxima than other phylogenetic tree reconstruction methods, such as BAMBE and MrBayes.

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