Computational approaches to de novo protein tertiary structure prediction, including those based on the preeminent “fragment-assembly” technique, have failed to scale up fully to larger proteins (on the order of 100 residues and above). A number of limiting factors are thought to contribute to the scaling problem over and above the simple combinatorial explosion, but the key ones relate to the lack of exploration of properly diverse protein folds, and to an acute form of “deception” in the energy function, whereby low-energy conformations do not reliably equate with native structures. In this article, solutions to both of these problems are investigated through a multistage memetic algorithm incorporating the successful Rosetta method as a local search routine. We found that specialised genetic operators significantly add to structural diversity and that this translates well to reaching low energies. The use of a generalised stochastic ranking procedure for selection enables the memetic algorithm to handle and traverse deep energy wells that can be considered deceptive, which further adds to the ability of the algorithm to obtain a much-improved diversity of folds. The results should translate to a tangible improvement in the performance of protein structure prediction algorithms in blind experiments such as CASP, and potentially to a further step towards the more challenging problem of predicting the three-dimensional shape of large proteins.

We consider optimization problems where the set of solutions available for evaluation at any given time t during optimization is some subset of the feasible space. This model is appropriate to describe many closed-loop optimization settings (i.e., where physical processes or experiments are used to evaluate solutions) where, due to resource limitations, it may be impossible to evaluate particular solutions at particular times (despite the solutions being part of the feasible space). We call the constraints determining which solutions are non-evaluable ephemeral resource constraints (ERCs). In this paper, we investigate two specific types of ERC: one encodes periodic resource availabilities, the other models commitment constraints that make the evaluable part of the space a function of earlier evaluations conducted. In an experimental study, both types of constraint are seen to impact the performance of an evolutionary algorithm significantly. To deal with the effects of the ERCs, we propose and test five different constraint-handling policies (adapted from those used to handle standard constraints), using a number of different test functions including a fitness landscape from a real closed-loop problem. We show that knowing information about the type of resource constraint in advance may be sufficient to select an effective policy for dealing with it, even when advance knowledge of the fitness landscape is limited.