Protein Dynamics and Function

Proteins appear at the same time to be rather simple and extremely complex. The overall reaction of a given protein can often be described in a very simple equation, but as soon as one delves more deeply into the mechanism of the reaction, it becomes more and more sophisticated. Proteins thus can be understood on a number of different levels. Ultimately the goal is to have predictive power and to know how a given mutation, for instance, changes the function. We are still far away from this goal, but we can outline some of the steps needed to arrive at the goal: The structure, the energy landscape, and the dynamics of the particular protein have to be known and understood and the laws govern the reactions have to be in hand. In the following, some of the essential steps will be sketched. Since a complete description of the various steps is not possible here, enough references are given.

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