The cavity method to protein design problem

Abstract

In this study, we propose an analytic statistical mechanics approach to solve a fundamental problem in biological physics called protein design. Protein design is an inverse problem of protein structure prediction, and its solution is the amino acid sequence that best stabilizes a given conformation. Despite recent rapid progress in protein design using deep learning, the challenge of exploring protein design principles remains. Contrary to previous computational physics studies, we used the cavity method, an extension of the mean-field approximation that becomes rigorous when the interaction network is a tree. We found that for small two-dimensional (2D) lattice hydrophobic-polar (HP) protein models, the design by the cavity method yields results almost equivalent to those from the Markov chain Monte Carlo method with lower computational cost.