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Protein Binding Interfaces and Their Binding Hot Spot Prediction: A Survey

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Bioinformatics for Diagnosis, Prognosis and Treatment of Complex Diseases

Part of the book series: Translational Bioinformatics ((TRBIO,volume 4))

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Abstract

In living organisms, genes are the blueprints or library, specifying instructions for building proteins. Proteins constitute the bulk of cells. Proteins mutual binding and interactions play a vital role in numerous functions and activities, such as signal transduction, enzymatic reactions, immunoreactions and inter-cellular communications. This survey provides basic knowledge of proteins and protein binding. First, we describe proteins’ fundamental elements, structures and functions. In Sect. 5.2, we present concepts related to protein binding and interactions. In Sect. 5.3, we explain why protein binding interfaces have a uneven distribution of binding free energy. In the Sects. 5.4 and 5.5, we explain why protein interfaces are complicated and how the current studies deal with this difficult problem. In Sect. 5.6, we present an overview on methods to model and predict binding free energy of protein interactions. Section 5.7 concludes this survey with a summary.

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Acknowledgments

This work is partly funded by an Australia Research Council Discovery Project (DP130102124).

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  1. Advanced Analytics Institute and Center for Health Technologies, University of Technology Sydney, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia

    Qian Liu & Jinyan Li

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  1. Qian Liu
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Correspondence to Jinyan Li .

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  1. Center for Systems Biology, Soochow University, Suzhou, People's Republic of China

    Bairong Shen

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Liu, Q., Li, J. (2013). Protein Binding Interfaces and Their Binding Hot Spot Prediction: A Survey. In: Shen, B. (eds) Bioinformatics for Diagnosis, Prognosis and Treatment of Complex Diseases. Translational Bioinformatics, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7975-4_5

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