PROTEAN: Deriving Protein Structure from Constraints

Engineering

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 5

Automated Reasoning

PROTEAN is an evolving knowledge-based system that is intended to identify the three-dimensional conformations of proteins in solution. Using a variety of empirically derived constraints, PROTEAN must identify legal positions for each of a protein’s constituent structures (e.g., atoms, amino acids, helices) in three-dimensional space. In fact, because protein-structure analysis is an underconstrained problem, PROTEAN must identify the entire family of conformations allowed by available constraints. In this paper, we discuss PROTEAN’s approach to the protein-structure analysis problem and its current implementation within the BBl blackboard architecture.