Computational Prediction of Functionally Important Regions in Proteins

Current projects for the massive characterization of proteomes are generating protein sequences and, to less extent, three dimensional structures with unknown function. Experimentally determining functional features of a protein is expensive, time consuming and difficult to automate. There is therefore a demand for computational methods for predicting protein functional features, which can be coupled to the pipelines of genome sequencing and structure determination. This review focuses on current in-silico methods for predicting regions in proteins with some functional importance (catalytic sites, binding sites, protein interaction regions, etc.) using sequence and/or three-dimensional structure information.