ABSTRACT
Protein folding is still a major problem that is incompletely understood at the present time. We have known since the pioneering experiments of Anfinsen (1) in the early 1960s that the folding of most globular proteins is a purely physical phenomenon dependent only on the specific amino acid sequence of the protein and the solvent environment. Hence, it should be possible to define a force field based on the physics of the interactions among atoms, including the solvent, and to use a statistical mechanical energy surface searching method, such as molecular dynamics or Monte Carlo, to determine the most stable structure of the protein at a given temperature and solvent condition.
