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There are more than trillion different proteins on earth, but they are made of combinatorial linkage and variation of much smaller number of protein structural motifs. These proteins function as individual units or as components of much larger complexes. Each motif can be considered as a center of a protein structure "galaxy" consisting of many proteins of similar or related structures, and the protein structure universe is composed of a large number of such galaxies. We have developed a computational method to "map" the protein structure universe represented by the known protein structural motifs. The map reveals features that may be interpretable in terms of evolution of protein structures and functions. Funded by NIH (P50 GM62412) Choi, I.G. and Kim, S.-H. Evolution of protein structural classes and protein sequence families. Proc. of the Nat. Acad. Sciences (2006). Hou, J., Jun, S. -R., Zhang, C., Kim, S. -H. Global mapping of the protein structure space and application in structure-based inference of protein function. Proc. of the Nat. Acad. Sciences. 102: 3651-3656. (2005). |
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