Monte Carlo for Protein Structures

While many good textbooks are available on Protein Structure, Molecular Simulations, Thermodynamics and Bioinformatics methods in general, there is no good introductory level book for the field of Structural Bioinformatics. This book aims to give an introduction into Structural Bioinformatics, which is where the previous topics meet to explore three dimensional protein structures through computational analysis. We provide an overview of existing computational techniques, to validate, simulate, predict and analyse protein structures. More importantly, it will aim to provide practical knowledge about how and when to use such techniques. We will consider proteins from three major vantage points: Protein structure quantification, Protein structure prediction, and Protein simulation & dynamics. In the previous chapter "Molecular Dynamics" we have considered protein simulations from a dynamical point of view, using Newton's laws. In the current Chapter, we first take a step back and return to the bare minimum needed to simulate proteins, and show that proteins may be simulated in a more simple fashion, using the partition function directly. This means we do not have to calculate explicit forces, velocities, moments and do not even consider time explicitly. Instead, we will rely on the fact that for most systems we will want to simulate, the system is in a dynamic equilibrium; and that we want to find the most stable states in such systems by determining the relative stabilities between those states.