Chapter 10: Protein Classification and Structure Prediction

One of the major goals of protein sequence analysis is to understand the relationship between amino acid sequence and three-dimentional structure in proteins. If this relationship were known, the structure of a protein could be reliably predicted from the amino acid sequence. Unfortunately, the relationship between sequence and structure is not that simple. Much progress has been made in categorizing proteins on the basis of structure or sequence, and this type of information is very useful for protein modeling. This chapter begins with a review of protein synthesis and structure, which is followed by a review of the methods used to classify proteins by structure, sequence, or both structure and sequence. Finally, the methods used to predict protein structure and evaluate the success of these predictions is reviewed.