Evolutionary Monte Carlo for protein folding simulations

We demonstrate that evolutionary Monte Carlo (EMC) can be applied successfu lly to simulations of protein folding on simple lattice models, and to find ing the ground state of a protein. In all cases, EMC is faster than the gen etic algorithm and the conventional Metropolis Monte Carlo, and in several cases it finds new lower energy states. We also propose one method for the use of secondary structures in protein folding. The numerical results show that it is drastically superior to other methods in finding the ground stat e of a protein. (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics.