Investigation of the parallel tempering method for protein folding

We investigate the suitability and efficiency of an adapted version of the parallel tempering method for all-atom protein folding. We have recently developed an all-atom free energy force field (PFF01) for protein structure prediction with stochastic optimization methods. Here we report reproducible folding of the 20-amino-acid trp-cage protein and the conserved 40-amino-acid three-helix HIV accessory protein with an adapted parallel tempering method. We find that the native state, for both proteins, is correctly predicted to 2 Å backbone root mean square deviation and analyse the efficiency of the simulation approach.