(1) Biomolecular Structure and Modelling Unit, Biochemistry amd Molecular
Biology Dept., University College, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT
(2) Crystallography Dept, Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX
thornton@biochemistry.ucl.ac.uk
The rapid increase in the number of three dimensional protein structures and the complexes they form with other molecules provides an expanding knowledge resource about interactions involved in molecular recognition. For example, protein-peptide and protein-nucleotide interactions are particularly common, and these interactions are important targets for the development of mimetics as potential drugs. In addition protein-protein interactions are perceived as increasingly important, as the mediators of signal transduction. Over the last few uears we have been developing a series of software tools to allow facile inspection of such interactions and quantitative approaches to their characterisation and prediction.
In this presentation some of these tools will be described and their
application to particular problems. In particular we shall consider:
i)Adenylate recognition: fuzzy templates (1)
ii)Clefts and Binding sites-a geometrical approach to prediction (2)
iii)Characterisation of protein-protein interfaces and Patch Analysis (3,4)
(1)Moodie et al (1996) J. Molecular Biology (in press)
(2)Laskowski et al (1996) Protein Science (in press)
(3)Jones & Thornton (1995)Prog. Biophys. Mol. Biol. 63,31-65
(4)Jones & Thornton (1996) Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 93,13-20