The History of the Protein Folding Problem: A Seventy Year Symbiotic Relationship Between Molecular Biology and Computer Science

Anyone who has taken high school biology knows of the fascinating race to discover the double helix by Watson and Crick: an exciting and dramatic tale complete with Nobel Prizes and betrayals that produced what many geneticists consider to be the discovery of the century. It revealed the physical structure of DNA at the molecular level, knowledge which has served as the bedrock for all future work in genetics and genetic engineering. However, few are aware of the far longer and more arduous journey that has been underway for almost one hundred years to unlock that same understanding for the other big set of macromolecules that make life possible: proteins. Proteins are the workhorses of the cell. They are the nanomachines that physically carry out all biological functions, and they are the objects that genetic code exists to produce. Unlike DNA, however, the scientific road to discover exactly how proteins work has proven far more difficult than anticipated and it has been far from linear. The decades-long effort to figure out how chains of amino acids fold into proteins -known as the protein folding problem- has stumped generations of researchers from across the globe. Nevertheless, immense progress has been made, and though we are still very far from…