Science Fair Project Encyclopedia Protein structure prediction
Protein structure prediction is one of the most significant
tasks tackled in computational structural biology. It has the
aim of determining the three-dimensional structure of proteins
from their amino acid sequences. In more formal terms, this is
the prediction of protein tertiary structure from primary
structure. Given the usefulness of known protein structures in
such valuable tasks as rational drug design, this is a highly
active field of research. Every two years, the performance of
current methods is assessed in the CASP experiment. The
practical role of protein structure prediction is now more
important than ever. Massive amounts of protein sequence data
may be derived from modern large-scale DNA sequencing efforts
of, for example, the Human Genome Project. The output of
experimentally determined protein structures, typically by time-
consuming and relatively expensive X-ray crystallography or NMR
spectroscopy, is lagging far behind the outp