Structure determination
Transmembrane proteins, reveal your structures - or we may use knowledge-based force
Although transmembrane proteins are considered to be the most attractive targets for drug discovery and may represent up to 30% of all human genes, there is frustratingly little structural information available for these molecules. With steadily increasing demand for detailed structures of transmembrane proteins, several academic groups and companies have recently achieved interesting progress towards new methods for predicting structures, potentially enabling three-dimensional models to be created for many of these proteins in the foreseeable future. [More]
Structural genomics: new routes from low-resolution structure to function
Structural genomics involves the systematic determination of structures for large numbers of proteins, with the ultimate goal of elucidating structural models for entire proteomes. The challenge of structural genomics is to characterise proteins having little or no structural similarity to proteins of known function, often resulting in low-resolution structures. Methods capable of accurately predicting protein function from these low-resolution structures will therefore be of increasing interest to groups seeking to exploit these growing databases of structural information. [More]
Structure prediction servers: rise of the machines
Protein structure is increasingly a preoccupation of computers, not of humans. Within the past decade, numerous automated servers have been developed that have taken computational structure prediction to new levels. Such servers, especially those for close and distant homology modelling, are now standard tools for many biomedical research laboratories, but often the question arises as to which server to use for which application. [More]
