Question

Searching for a fold with the absolute minimum energy may not be valid in reality.

(a) True

(b) False

I have been asked this question by my college director while I was bunking the class.

The question is from Ab Initio Protein Structural Prediction & Homology Modeling topic in portion Protein Tertiary Structure Prediction of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

The correct answer is (a) True

To explain: These algorithms search for every possible conformation to find the one with the lowest global energy. However, searching for a fold with the absolute minimum energy may not be valid in reality. This contributes to one of the fundamental flaws of this approach. In addition, searching for all possible structural conformations is not yet computationally feasible.