Related papers: Sequence correlations shape protein promiscuity
Accurately determining a change in protein binding affinity upon mutations is important for the discovery and design of novel therapeutics and to assist mutagenesis studies. Determination of change in binding affinity upon mutations…
Empirical scoring functions based on either molecular force fields or cheminformatics descriptors are widely used, in conjunction with molecular docking, during the early stages of drug discovery to predict potency and binding affinity of a…
The coding space of protein sequences is shaped by evolutionary constraints set by requirements of function and stability. We show that the coding space of a given protein family--the total number of sequences in that family--can be…
We study a large data set of protein structure ensembles of very diverse sizes determined by nuclear magnetic resonance. By examining the distance-dependent correlations in the displacement of residues pairs and conducting finite size…
Prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity is a major goal in drug discovery. Generally, free energy gap is calculated between two states (e.g., ligand binding and unbinding). The energy gap implicitly includes the effects of changes in…
The process of protein search for specific binding sites on DNA is fundamentally important since it marks the beginning of all major biological processes. We present a theoretical investigation that probes the role of DNA sequence symmetry,…
The spectrum and scale of fluctuations in protein structures affect the range of cell phenomena, including stability of protein structures or their fragments, allosteric transitions and energy transfer. The study presents a…
Figuring out small molecule binding sites in target proteins, in the resolution of either pocket or residue, is critical in many virtual and real drug-discovery scenarios. Since it is not always easy to find such binding sites based on…
Computational methods are needed to differentiate the small fraction of missense mutations that contribute to disease by disrupting protein function from neutral variants. We describe several complementary methods using large-scale homology…
Using techniques borrowed from statistical physics and neural networks, we determine the parameters, associated with a scoring function, that are chosen optimally to ensure complete success in threading tests in a training set of proteins.…
Specific binding of proteins to DNA is one of the most common ways in which gene expression is controlled. Although general rules for the DNA-protein recognition can be derived, the ambiguous and complex nature of this mechanism precludes a…
While all the information required for the folding of a protein is contained in its amino acid sequence, one has not yet learned how to extract this information to predict the three--dimensional, biologically active, native conformation of…
The Saccharomyces cerevisiae protein-protein interaction map, as well as many natural and man-made networks, shares the scale-free topology. The preferential attachment model was suggested as a generic network evolution model that yields…
Proteins have regular tertiary structures but irregular amino acid sequences. This made it very difficult to decode the structural information in the protein sequences. Here we demonstrate that many small alpha protein domains have hidden…
Sequences of nucleotides (for DNA and RNA) or amino acids (for proteins) are central objects in biology. Among the most important computational problems is that of sequence alignment, i.e. arranging sequences from different organisms in…
The cornerstone of computational drug design is the calculation of binding affinity between two biological counterparts, especially a chemical compound, i.e., a ligand, and a protein. Predicting the strength of protein-ligand binding with…
Determination of binding affinity of proteins in the formation of protein complexes requires sophisticated, expensive and time-consuming experimentation which can be replaced with computational methods. Most computational prediction…
The principle of similarity, or homophily, is often used to explain patterns observed in complex networks such as transitivity and the abundance of triangles (3-cycles). However, many phenomena from division of labor to protein-protein…
Proteins, by virtue of their central role in most biological processes, represent one of the key subjects of the study of molecular evolution. Inherent to the indispensability of proteins for living cells is the fact that a given protein…
Proteins are an important class of biomolecules that serve as essential building blocks of the cells. Their three-dimensional structures are responsible for their functions. In this thesis we have investigated the protein structures using a…