Protein folding

• Main Author: Cohen, Fred E.
• Other Authors: Phillips, David C. : Richards, Frederic Middlebrook
• Published: University of Oxford 1980
• Subjects: 572; Protein folding : Amino acid sequence : Proteins : Structure : Structure-activity relationships
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.256104

Recent studies of the relationship between protein sequence and protein structure are reviewed. A detailed discussion of past attempts to predict the structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence, the protein folding problem, is presented and the strengths and weaknesses of these methods are examined. The root-mean-square deviation is studied and a benchmark for structural comparisons is established. A combinatorial approach to the protein folding problem is outlined and its advantages over existing methods is discussed. Specific algorithms based on the combinatorial approach are developed and applied to a variety of proteins. The success of this approach in terms of the root-mean-square deviation benchmark as well as the drawbacks of this method are presented.