Computational Methods for Protein Structure Prediction and Fold Recognition

Amino acid sequence analysis provides important insight into the structure of proteins, which in turn greatly facilitates the understanding of its biochemical and cellular function. Efforts to use computational methods in predicting protein structure based only on sequence information started 30 years ago (Nagano 1973; Chou and Fasman 1974). However, only during the last decade, has the introduction of new computational techniques such as protein fold recognition and the growth of sequence and structure databases due to modern high-throughput technologies led to an increase in the success rate of prediction methods, so that they can be used by the molecular biologist or biochemist as an aid in the experimental investigations.