<p>This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.</p> <p>The purpose of this short article is to examine certain aspects of protein functionality
with relation to some key organizing ideas. This is important from a computational
viewpoint in order to take account of modelling both biological systems and
knowledge of these systems. We look at some of the lexical dimensions of the
function and how certain constructs can be related to underlying ideas. The pervasive
computational metaphor is then discussed in relation to protein multifunctionality,
and the specific case of von Willebrand factor as a ‘smart’ multifunctional protein
is briefly considered. Some diagrammatic techniques are then introduced to better
articulate protein function.</p>
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Comp Funct Genomics. 2004 Feb; 5(1):85-90