Research on Computational Methods of Prediction of Protein Interaction Sites
Deng Qin-kai · Zhongguo yixue wulixue zazhi · 2006
Many essential cellular processes such as signal transduction,transport,cellular motion and most regulatory mechanisms are mediated by protein-protein interactions.Physically,protein interactions are mediated by short sequences of residues that form the contact interfaces between two interacting proteins,often referred as their binding sites.Though many experimental methods and computational methods have been developed to detect protein interactions with increasing levels of accuracies,few methods can pinpoint the specific residues in the proteins that are involved in the interactions.Identification of protein-protein interaction sites and detection of specific amino acid residues that contribute to the specificity and strength of protein interactions is an important problem with applications ranging from rational drug design to analysis of metabolic and signal transduction networks.With the development of Bioinformatics and computational biology,some computational methods based on sequence and structure information by characterizing the known interaction sites for protein-protein interaction sites prediction is developed.We introduced several computational methods that have made some progress in protein-protein interaction sites prediction,including methods based on genomics,methods based on primary sequence and methods based on 3D structure information.With regard to these computational methods,combined approaches can reasonably accurately identify putative interacting sites,but these methods are,however,limited by the library of already solved structures and known interaction sites.Thus,while some progress has been made,the field is clearly in its infancy and much work will be required to bring the prediction of protein-protein interaction sites to a robust and reliable state.