期刊名称:Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal
印刷版ISSN:2001-0370
出版年度:2013
卷号:8
期号:0
DOI:10.5936/csbj.201308007
语种:English
出版社:Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal
摘要:Structural genomics projects have solved many new structures with unknown functions. One strategy to investigate the function of a structure is to computationally find the functionally important residues or regions on it. Therefore, the development of functional region prediction methods has become an important research subject. An effective approach is to use a method employing structural and evolutionary information, such as the evolutionary trace (ET) method. ET ranks the residues of a protein structure by calculating the scores for relative evolutionary importance, and locates functionally important sites by identifying spatial clusters of highly ranked residues. After ET was developed, numerous ET-like methods were subsequently reported, and many of them are in practical use, although they require certain conditions. In this mini review, we first introduce the remaining problems and the recent improvements in the methods using structural and evolutionary information. We then summarize the recent developments of the methods. Finally, we conclude by describing possible extensions of the evolution- and structure-based methods.