Quantum speedup for protein structure prediction

  • Renata Wong*
  • , Weng Long Chang
  • *Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal Article peer-review

28 Scopus citations

Abstract

Protein structure prediction (PSP) predicts the native conformation for a given protein sequence. Classically, the problem has been shown to belong to the NP-complete complexity class. Its applications range from physics, through bioinformatics to medicine and quantum biology. It is possible however to speed it up with quantum computational methods, as we show in this paper. Here we develop a fast quantum algorithm for PSP in three-dimensional hydrophobic-hydrophilic model on body-centered cubic lattice with quadratic speedup over its classical counterparts. Given a protein sequence of n amino acids, our algorithm reduces the temporal and spatial complexities to, respectively, O(2n/2) and O(n2log n). With respect to oracle-related quantum algorithms for the NP-complete problems, we identify our algorithm as optimal. To justify the feasibility of the proposed algorithm we successfully solve the problem on IBM quantum simulator involving 21 and 25 qubits. We confirm the experimentally obtained high probability of success in finding the desired conformation by calculating the theoretical probability estimations.

Original languageEnglish
Article number9374469
Pages (from-to)323-330
Number of pages8
JournalIEEE Transactions on Nanobioscience
Volume20
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - 07 2021
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2002-2011 IEEE.

Keywords

  • Molecular algorithms
  • NP-complete problems
  • protein structure prediction
  • quantum algorithms
  • quantum biology
  • quantum simulation
  • quantum speedup

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