  We present an efficient algorithm to recover the three dimensional structure
of a protein from its contact map representation. First we show that when a
physically realizable map is used as target, our method generates a structure
whose contact map is essentially similar to the target. Furthermore, the
reconstructed and original structures are similar up to the resolution of the
contact map representation. Next we use non-physical target maps, obtained by
corrupting a physical one; in this case our method essentially recovers the
underlying physical map and structure. Hence our algorithm will help to fold
proteins, using dynamics in the space of contact maps. Finally we investigate
the manner in which the quality of the recovered structure degrades when the
number of contacts is reduced.
