Enhancement of protein folding problem using a genetic algorithm with introns

Genetic algorithms have proved to be a successful method for predicting the protein structure. In this paper, we report experiments demonstrating that the insertion of introns (non functional sequences of DNA) into bit strings can lead to dramatic increase in the success rate of the genetic algorithm in finding a solution to the protein folding problem. We have demonstrated the superiority of an intron based genetic algorithm on several instances of the protein-folding problem, which not only finds the optimum solution, but also finds them faster than the traditional approach.