Reference: Brinkley, J.; Cornelius, C.; Altman, R.; Hayes-Roth, B.; Lichtarge, O.; Duncan, B.; Buchanan, B.; & Jardetzky, O. Application of Constraint Satisfaction Techniques to the Determination of Protein Tertiary Structure. March, 1986.
Abstract: The determination of protein tertiary structure can be described as a three- dimensional spatial arrangement task similar to many other physical design tasks. For protein structure the task is to arrange parts of the protein subject to a set of undetermined and imprecise constraints. A representation is described that allows this task to be treated as a constraint satisfaction problem. Node consistency algorithms, developed mostly in the field of computer vision, are applied to the solution of a small protein fragment called the lac repressor headpiece, using data obtained from nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Application of these algorithms, together with heuristic methods of control and refinement, greatly reduces the combinatorics of constraint satisfaction, and should be useful for other physical design problems as well.
Notes: Working Paper 14 pages.