Hue Sun Chan is in the Department of Biochemistry,
and Department of Medical Genetics and Microbiology, Faculty of Medicine,
University of Toronto, 1 King's College Circle,
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A8, Canada. chan@arrhenius.med.toronto.edu
A new computational approach optimizes searches for reduced protein folding
alphabets that use fewer than 20 types of amino acids. The predicted optimal
five-letter alphabet happens to be in agreement with the suggestive results
of a recent experiment, but whether highly reduced alphabets are sufficient
for truly protein-like properties remains an open experimental question.
