/sci/ - Science & Math

On Christmas Eve, I created a program that randomly generates an amino acid sequence. One codon at a time, the peptide bond chain is generated.

There are four nucleotides. A codon is composed of three nucleotides. Therefore, there are 64 unique codons.

There are 19 amino acids and 1 imino acid. For simplicity, it's said there are 20 amino acids. Each codon generates one amino acid.

The program I created assumes all codons have an equal probability of being generated. Three codons are stop codons. The program terminates when a stop codon is generated.

Now, the next logical step is to create a program that randomly generates an alpha helix or beta-pleated sheet. However, to do this, I need to know which sequences of amino acids fold into an alpha helix and which peptide bond chains fold into a beat-pleated sheet.

I've read many books about proteins and peptides, nanotechnology, and molecular biology but no book has provided the necessary information. So I'm wondering: is there a book or database which provides a list of amino acid sequences which fold into an alpha helix or beta-pleated sheet?

If not all possible configurations have been tested, is there at least conjecture which would be helpful? For example, suppose polar amino acids tend to fold one way. Suppose cystine tends to make the the polypeptide chain fold another way. Suppose the size of the amino acid also determines which of the two possible secondary protein structures form.

Note, the only type of structure I'm interested in right now is the secondary structure. Different rules apply to how polypetide chains fold in protein domains, tertiary structures, and quaternary structures.