Proteins are a group of molecules involved in practically all biological functions that owe their versatility to the ability of binding structurally complementary ligands. Due to the limitations of experimental techniques, however, the number of resolved structures is lagging behind the number of known sequences, calling for the development of structural prediction algorithms. Since the native structure corresponds to the global minimum of the free energy function, the protein folding problem can be recast in a global optimization problem. Genetic algorithms (GA) are optimization tools that...