Metaheuristic Algorithm Applications for the NMR Protein Structure-Based Assignment Problem

X-Ray Crystallography and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR)  spectroscopy are two major experimental techniques for obtaining structural information of proteins. Since the X-Ray approach is costly and time consuming, the NMR approach is gaining great interest among researchers. The key bottleneck of NMR studies is mapping the NMR peaks to corresponding nuclei, also known as the assignment problem. The assignment problem is of NP hard type and combinatorial optimization tools and metaheuristic algorithms can be employed to perform assignments. Structure Based Assignment is an approach solving this computationally challenging problem by using prior information about the protein obtained from a homologous structure. I am involved in applying metaheuristic algorithms in the Structure Based Assignment approach. I propose Tabu Search algorithm for the Structure Based Assignment problem to achieve higher assignment accuracy.