Metaheuristics based de novo protein sequencing: A new approach

In this article, a new approach is proposed for the de novo protein sequencing problem. The aim is to find the sequence of an experimental protein from only experimental data, i.e. without databases. To do so, a three-step model called SSO for Shape, Sequence and Order has been designed. No prior knowledge in genomics nor protein databases are used. Here we modelized de novo protein sequencing as a combinatorial optimisation problem and propose cooperative metaheuristics to solve it. Results are assessed on experimental proteins and proved the feasibility of this approach.