Despite significant progress in recent years, ab initio folding is still one of the most challenging problems in structural biology. This paper presents a probabilistic graphical
model for ab initio folding, which employs Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) and directional statistics to model the relationship
between the primary sequence of a protein and its three-dimensional structure. Different from the widely-used fragment assembly
method and the lattice model for protein folding, our graphical model can explore protein conformations in a continuous space
according to their probability. The probability of a protein conformation reflects its stability and is estimated from PSI-BLAST
sequence profile and predicted secondary structure. Experimental results indicate that this new method compares favorably
with the fragment assembly method and the lattice model.
Keywords protein structure prediction - ab initio folding - conditional random fields (CRFs) - directional statistics - fragment assembly - lattice model