We study the support sets of sub-topical functions‎ ‎and investigate their maximal elements in order to establish a necessary and sufficient condition‎ ‎for the global minimum of the difference of two sub-topical functions‎.

BACKGROUND Proteins seem to have their native structure in a global minimum of free energy. No mechanism is known, however, for ensuring this property. Furthermore, computational complexity studies suggest that such a mechanism is not feasible. These seemingly contradictory observations can be reconciled by the suggestion that evolutionary selection can yield proteins whose native conformation ...

Previously we introduced the concept of continuous quantification of uniqueness, as a general purpose technique designed to be applicable to any situation in which there is a need to decide which of several equally effective objects to choose for a task, that requires recognition of the chosen object, in a variety of contexts, by comparing attributes which contain a non trivial amount of contex...

A global optimization method, conformational space annealing (CSA), is applied to study a 46-residue protein with the sequence B9N3(LB)4N3B9N3(LB)5L, where B, L and N designate hydrophobic, hydrophilic, and neutral residues, respectively. The 46-residue BLN protein is folded into the native state of a four-stranded β-barrel. It has been a challenging problem to locate the global minimum of the ...