Protein informatics towards function identification

Abstract

The study of structural genomics and structural proteomics has determined the tertiary structures of many hypothetical proteins, whose molecular functions could not be understood using conventional methods. In order to infer the geometrical location of the functional site, the biochemical function and the biological function of the hypothetical protein, much effort has been made in protein informatics. The importance of heterogeneous databases and various descriptors of amino acid sequences, tertiary structures and pathways on the proteome scale has been emphasised.