Metaheuristic Techniques for Conformational Search

---------------------------------------------------------------------***--------------------------------------------------------------------Abstract The drawback in conformational search (CS) is in locating the most stable conformation of a molecule with the minimum potential energy based on a mathematical function. The number of local minima grows exponentially with molecular size and this makes it that more difficult to arrive at a solution. It had been confirmed that CS belongs to the category of NP-hard (non-deterministic polynomial time) problem. Such complexity requires an equally long amount of time to achieve resolution. This phenomenon is thus known as the 'combinatorial explosion'.