Frontiers in Structural Biology

Frontiers in Structural Biology

The main focus of a structural biologist is protein structure determination and drug design. Protein plays an important role in human body. Proteins are one of the most important parts of any biological systems. Living things would not exist without proteins as it is involved in all aspects of living things. Several proteins provide structure to cells; others tend to bind to and carry vital molecules all through the body. Some proteins are involved in biochemical reactions in the body which are termed as enzymes. Others are involved in muscle contractions and immunity. Structure determination of proteins has always been a challenging field. The complex areas in the field include viruses, pathogens, membrane proteins and signaling pathways. Novel progressions are being done in the arenas of nanopatterning and multiscale modeling of cell signaling proteins. Understanding the folding of the amino-acid chain to produce functional proteins is essential for studying cellular systems. A problem in structural bioinformatics is to determine the three-dimensional (3-D) structure of a protein when only a sequence of amino acid residues is given. These methods can be divided into four main classes: (a) first principle methods without database information; (b) first principle methods with database information; (c) fold recognition and threading methods, and (d) comparative modeling methods and sequence alignment strategies.