Monte Carlo simulation of a statistical mechanical model of multiple protein sequence alignment

A grand canonical Monte Carlo (MC) algorithm is presented for studying the lattice gas model (LGM) of multiple protein sequence alignment, which coherently combines long-range interactions and variable-length insertions. MC simulations are used for both parameter optimization of the model and production runs to explore the sequence subspace around a given protein family. In this Note, I describe the details of the MC algorithm as well as some preliminary results of MC simulations with various temperatures and chemical potentials, and compare them with the mean-field approximation. The existence of a two-state transition in the sequence space is suggested for the SH3 domain family, and inappropriateness of the mean-field approximation for the LGM is demonstrated.