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Protein folding using quantum computers
  • Rajat Kumar Vishwakarma
Rajat Kumar Vishwakarma
Department of Physics, University of Allahabad

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Abstract

Protein folding has been one of the most difficult problems for over a half-century,The random thermal motions causing conformational changes that lead energetically downhill towards the native structure, a principle captured in funnel-shaped energy landscapes.Unfolded polypeptides have a wide range of possible conformations. The search problem becomes intractable for classical computers due to the exponential growth of potential conformations with chain length. So far, there is theoretical and experimental evidence that solving such optimization problems using Quantum Computing approaches such as Quantum Annealing, VQE, and QAOA has an advantage. Although Google's DeepMind-AlphaFold has accomplished much,But we can go even further with the quantum approach.Here we show how to predict structure of protein as well as RNA folding using the Variational Quantum Eigensolver with Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) expectation values for the solution of the problem and for finding the minimum configuration energy and our task is to identify a protein's minimal energy structure. The protein's structure is optimized to reduce energy. Also making sure that all physical constraints are met and encoding the protein folding problem into a qubit operator.