title: Bridging protein local structures and protein functions.
abstract: One of the major goals of molecular and evolutionary biology is to understand the functions of proteins by extracting functional information from protein sequences, structures and interactions. In this review, we summarize the repertoire of methods currently being applied and report recent progress in the field of in silico annotation of protein function based on the accumulation of vast amounts of sequence and structure data. In particular, we emphasize the newly developed structure-based methods, which are able to identify locally structural motifs and reveal their relationship with protein functions. These methods include computational tools to identify the structural motifs and reveal the strong relationship between these pre-computed local structures and protein functions. We also discuss remaining problems and possible directions for this exciting and challenging area.
authors.affiliation: Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100080, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Zhi-Ping
authors.initials: ZP
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Ling-Yun
authors.initials: LY
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.forename: Yong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Xiang-Sun
authors.initials: XS
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Luonan
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Chen
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000502:physiology*; D020539:Sequence Analysis, Protein; D013329:Structure-Activity Relationship
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins