Structural Bioinformatics: Transforming protein structures into biological insights

Abstract

Structural bioinformatics is an area that has emerged to comprehend and interpret large amounts of structural data, and promises to provide a high resolution understanding of biology. Protein structures can be compared, analyzed and mined in various ways, which allows us to understand the functions of these molecules and reason precisely how and why such capabilities have emerged in them. The main advantages these methods have over simpler sequence based methods are that besides helping in associating a molecule with a function, they also provide ultimate insights into the mechanisms by which various biological events take place. This report provides an overview of structural bioinformatics, various advances in the recent years and the range and scope of data driven protein structural analysis. In particular, current trends in structure prediction, structure alignments, deriving sub-structures and structural motifs, understanding features critical for molecular recognition as well as using these for understanding function of protein molecules are presented. Application of structural knowledge in drug discovery for lead identification as well as novel ways of understanding drug adverse effects and drug resistance are also discussed. Finally prospects for structure based vaccine design are also outlined. The various aspects of structural bioinformatics discussed here, show how biological insights can be obtained from protein structures.