Current Protein and Peptide Science - Volume 8, Issue 3, 2007

Surprisingly, after at least two decades of researches focused on the analysis of the similarity between protein three-dimensional structures, several new comparison methods were proposed during the last few years. These are briefly summarized and commented below. Some of the newly developed techniques are fast and were designed to handle large amounts of data and vast structural databases. Other methods Read More

Protein structure prediction with computational methods has gained much attention in the research fields of protein engineering and protein folding studies. Due to the vastness of conformational space, one of the major tasks is to restrain the flexibility of protein structure and reduce the search space. Many studies have revealed that, with the information of disulfide connectivity available, the search in conformational space can Read More

Glycoconjugates comprise a variety of structures, include glycoproteins and glycolipids and are found on the surfaces of animal and plant cells, as well as on the surface of microorganisms. Determination of the structure and the distribution of glycoconjugates on cell surfaces are important for the understanding their biological function. Lectins are useful to investigate protein-carbohydrate interactions, because they have specif Read More

In live cells, protein folding often cannot occur spontaneously, but requires the participation of helper proteins - molecular chaperones and foldases. The mechanisms employed by chaperones markedly increase the effectiveness of protein folding, but have no bearing on the rate of this process, whereas foldases actually accelerate protein folding by exerting a direct influence on the rate-limiting steps of the overall react Read More

Somatotropin, commonly known as growth hormone (GH) is a polypeptide chain containing about 190 amino acid residues, produced by the pituitary gland in mammals and is responsible for a number of anabolic processes. It has two disulphide bridges, with 4 alpha helices arranged in anti-paralel distinctive manner. GH molecule binds with two receptor molecules to exhibit its full biological activity. In this review, the info Read More

The Death Domain Fold superfamily of evolutionarily conserved protein-protein interaction domains consists of 4 subfamilies: the death domain, the death effector domain, the caspase recruitment domain, and the PYRIN domain. Interaction of Death Domain Fold containing proteins modulates the activity of several downstream effectors, such as caspases and transcription factors. Recent studies provide evidence for not only ho Read More