title: Searching protein structure databases has come of age.
abstract: The number of protein structures known in atomic detail has increased from one in 1960 (Kendrew, J.C., Strandberg, B.E., Hart, R.G., Davies, D.R., Phillips, D.C., Shore, V.C. Nature (London) 185:422-427, 1960) to more than 1000 in 1994. The rate at which new structures are being published exceeds one a day as a result of recent advances in protein engineering, crystallography, and spectroscopy. More and more frequently, a newly determined structure is similar in fold to a known one, even when no sequence similarity is detectable. A new generation of computer algorithms has now been developed that allows routine comparison of a protein structure with the database of all known structures. Such structure database searches are already used daily and they are beginning to rival sequence database searches as a tool for discovering biologically interesting relationships.
authors.affiliation: Protein Design Group, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany.
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Holm
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Sander
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D001665:Binding Sites; D016208:Databases, Factual; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D011487:Protein Conformation; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry*; D017386:Sequence Homology, Amino Acid; D012984:Software; D013329:Structure-Activity Relationship
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins