Prediction of Protein Quaternary Structures

Determination of the protein structure and understanding its function is essential for any relevant medical, engineering, or pharmaceutical applications. Therefore, the study of quaternary structure of proteins, despite all the obstacles in acquiring data from large macromolecular assemblies, is one of the major goals in biomolecular sciences. This chapter discusses respectively protein structure prediction, template-based predictions, critical assessment of protein structure prediction (CASP), and quaternary structure prediction. Homology modeling and threading methods are two types of template-based approaches. The homology modeling method needs to have the homologous protein structure as template and threading methods are a new approach in fold recognition, in which the tool attempts to fit the sequence in the known structures. A few sequence-based computational methods have been developed for the prediction of protein quaternary structure using statistical models or machine learning methods.