Proteins make our bodies work — they are the movers and shakers of the organism, breathing, digesting, building, and synthesizing energy. But when proteins go wrong, they can turn from cogs in the wheel of life to triggers of disease. Despite sequencing the human genome, the three-dimensional structures of only a small fraction of the billions of proteins found in all living organisms have been determined, mostly by x-ray crystallography. Fortunately, this rapidly expanding corpus of protein data constitutes a test-bed for scientists to develop the computational technology and predictive tools that will help us learn about the remainder of the unknown proteins.
Unpacking Protein Function
April 21, 2009