Journal article
Investigating the potential for a limited quantum speedup on protein lattice problems
- Abstract:
- Protein folding, the determination of the lowest-energy configuration of a protein, is an unsolved computational problem. If protein folding could be solved, it would lead to significant advances in molecular biology, and technological development in areas such as drug discovery and catalyst design. As a hard combinatorial optimisation problem, protein folding has been studied as a potential target problem for adiabatic quantum computing. Although several experimental implementations have been discussed in the literature, the computational scaling of these approaches has not been elucidated. In this article, we present a numerical study of the (stoquastic) adiabatic quantum algorithm applied to protein lattice folding. Using exact numerical modelling of small systems, we find that the time-to-solution metric scales exponentially with peptide length, even for small peptides. However, comparison with classical heuristics for optimisation indicates a potential limited quantum speedup. Overall, our results suggest that quantum algorithms may well offer improvements for problems in the protein folding and structure prediction realm.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 6.5MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1088/1367-2630/ac29ff
Authors
- Publisher:
- IOP Science
- Journal:
- New Journal of Physics More from this journal
- Volume:
- 23
- Article number:
- 103030
- Publication date:
- 2021-09-24
- Acceptance date:
- 2021-09-24
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1367-2630
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1099846
- Local pid:
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pubs:1099846
- Deposit date:
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2020-10-30
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Rubiera et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2021
- Rights statement:
- © 2021 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd on behalf of Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft and the Institute of Physics. As the Version of Record of this article is going to be / has been published on a gold open access basis under a CC BY 3.0 licence, this Accepted Manuscript is available for reuse under a CC BY 3.0 licence immediately.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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