Multi-Agent Systems in Three-Dimensional Protein Structure Prediction

Tertiary protein structure prediction in silico is currently a challenging problem in Structural Bioinformatics and can be classified according to the computational complexity theory as an NP-hard problem. Determining the 3-D structure of a protein is both experimentally expensive, and time-consuming. The agent-based paradigm has been shown a useful technique for the applications that have repetitive and time-consuming activities, knowledge share and management, such as integration of different knowledge sources and modeling of complex systems, supporting a great variety of domains. This chapter provides an integrated view and insights about the protein structure prediction area concerned to the usage, application and implementation of multi-agent systems to predict the protein structures or to support and coordinate the existing predictors, as well as it is advantages, issues, needs, and demands. It is noteworthy that there is a great need for works related to multi-agent and agent-based paradigms applied to the problem due to their excellent suitability to the problem.