title: Designability and disease.
abstract: Structural designability is the number of ways it is possible to encode for structure. A protein's designability has been equated with the size of sequence space encoding for the protein's structure, a measure that reflects the structure's robustness to mutation. Current evidence suggests that designability is fundamental to our understanding of the evolvability and distribution of structures in nature and is a significant factor associated with human disease. Here, we describe definitions and principles underlying the concept of designability and discuss its relation to disease.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Bioinformatics, GSF-National Research Center for Environment and Health, Neuherberg, Germany.
authors.forename: Philip
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Wong
authors.forename: Dmitrij
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Frishman
mesh_terms: D004194:Disease; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D006801:Humans; D011487:Protein Conformation; D015202:Protein Engineering; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000235:genetics
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins