Distance Learning: Techniques in Structural Molecular Biology (TSMB)

This section gives a quick introduction to various bioinformatics tools that are useful in gathering information about a given target protein. For the most part these tools are available on the WWW and are fairly simple to use. Only the key tools will be covered here.

• Target Selection

Importance of protein structure
Traditional approaches - biology driven
New approaches - structural genomics driven
Target identification in drug discovery

• Protein Sequence Databases

Primary Sequence Databases
Composite Sequence Databases
Genome Sequence Databases
Sequence Search Methods

• Secondary Databases

Motif and Pattern Databases
Domain Databases

• 3D Structure Databases

Primary Structural Data (PDB)
Structural Features
Protein Structure Classification
Molecular Modelling

• Biological Databases

Pathway Databases
Disease Databases

• Structure Prediction

Secondary Structure Prediction
Tertiary Structure Prediction

Objectives

To introduce the key resources on the WWW for sequence, structural and functional information on proteins. At the end of this section students should

• Know what information is available on proteins, and to a lesser extent DNA
• To be familiar with typical sequence search methods on the Web
• To be able to accumulate information on a given protein sequence and get an idea on what its structure and function may be