DigitalCommons@Linfield

Computational Studies of Protein Folding

Jereld R. Nicholson Library

Proteins are known to fold to tertiary structures that determine the functionality of the protein in living organisms. The goal of our research is to better understand the protein folding process and to see if protein folding is a self-organized critical process. There are many different examples of self-organized criticality in nature, such as sand piles and earthquakes. Using MATLAB, we create an algorithm that models the folding process via a Monte Carlo time step approach. Specifically, amino acids in the chain at each time step are allowed to fold to certain locations according to a set of rules. We hope to observe whether or not the protein folding process exhibits features that are independent of the protein's size (a typical trait of self-organized criticality).