Biological molecules such as proteins and nucleic acids owe their activity to their three-dimensional (3-D) structure. Due to the recent improvements in sequencing techniques, a large number of protein and nucleic acid sequences are known. However, the determination of their structures by X-ray crystallography is such a long and expensive process that only few protein and nucleic acid tertiary structures have been determined.
In theory the information embedded in protein and nucleic acid sequences should be sufficient to infer their tertiary folding. Therefore, the development of theoretical methods for the prediction and determination of protein and RNA 3-D structures from sequence and structural information are investigated.
The 3-D structure modeling and prediction problems consist of fixing, in 3-D space, the position of each atom such that the stereochemistry rules and known structural constraints are satisfied. In many cases structural information is available such that models can be generated. Therefore, it is desirable that any predictive method allows for the incorporation and use of experimental data in search procedure.