Resource-Efficient Quantum Algorithm for Protein Folding

Understand

Predicting the three-dimensional (3D) structure of a protein from its primary sequence of amino acids is known as the protein folding (PF) problem.

• Due to the central role of proteins' 3D structures in chemistry, biology and medicine applications (e.g., in drug discovery) this subject has been intensively studied for over half a century.
• Although classical algorithms provide practical solutions, sampling the conformation space of small proteins, they cannot tackle the intrinsic NP-hard complexity of the problem, even reduced to its simplest Hydrophobic-Polar model.
• While fault-tolerant quantum computers are still beyond reach for state-of-the-art quantum technologies, there is evidence that quantum algorithms can be successfully used on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers to accelerate energy optimization in frustrated systems.