A functional programming approach to a computational biology problem

Abstract

Protein Folding is an important open problem in the eld of Computational Biology Due to its com binatorial nature exact polynomial algorithms to solve it could not exist and so approximation algorithms and heuristics has to be used In this paper a new heuristic is studied based on the approach that considers that the folding process is coded into the protein One important aspect of this work is that the algorithm was implemented using functional programming resulting in advantages for the understanding of the problem The results obtained are comparable with the ones obtained for classical algorithms .