Prediction of Protein Structure and Function by Using Bioinformatics

Proteins mediate virtually all biological processes. Understanding the mechanisms by which proteins function requires a knowledge of their three-dimensional (3D) structures. As a consequence of the genome and full-length cDNA sequencing projects, there are several orders of magnitude more protein sequences compared with experimentally determined protein structures. To bridge this information gap, there is a considerable impetus to predict accurately the structures of proteins from sequence information. Protein structure prediction using bioinformatics can involve sequence similarity searches, multiple sequence alignments, identification and characterization of domains, secondary structure prediction, solvent accessibility prediction, automatic protein-fold recognition, and constructing 3D protein structures to atomic detail (see Fig. 1). The bioinformatics techniques used in predicting protein structure depend on the outcome from the analysis outlined in Fig. 1 and Table 1.