The Art of Folding Synthetic Proteins

Team: 68

School: Los Alamos High

Area of Science: Biochemistry

Proposal: The aim of my project is to simulate the most effective way in which synthetic proteins can fold. Protein folding is a very important problem in biology, because it is involved in nearly all living processes. The failure to fold is associated with many well-known diseases. In order to find effective folding sequences, I plan to use the open-source Protein Database and Python-based simulations to explore this problem. I will use a genetic algorithm to find and design artificial proteins that fold extremely effectively. I hope that this project will yield some interesting insight to protein folding. If initially successful, I will investigate GPU-based algorithms and specialized Python libraries to accelerate my program.

Team Members:

  Alexander Swart

Sponsoring Teacher: Lee Goodwin

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