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Computational Protein Design

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Encyclopedia of Biophysics

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In the Beginning

Millions of years of evolution have produced an astonishing array of proteins that are involved in all essential cellular functions such as catalysis, molecular recognition, immune defense, locomotion, and structural assembly. While scientists went a long way in understanding how various functions are conveyed by proteins, attempts to improve protein function frequently resulted in failure. It proved to be even more difficult to create functional proteins de novo, based solely on basic principles. The field of protein design was born three decades ago with the goal of designing simplified proteins that mimic natural, more complicated counterparts. The first studies in the early 1990s proved that small alpha-helical and beta-sheet proteins could be designed from a simplified amino acid alphabet. The initial designs used only pen and paper and were based on our basic understanding of protein folding, such as burying hydrophobic amino acids and exposing to solvent...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological Chemistry, The Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Julia Shifman & Anamika Singh

Authors
  1. Julia Shifman
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  2. Anamika Singh
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Julia Shifman .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University Leicester MRC Centre, Leicester, UK

    Gordon Roberts

  2. Dept Biochemistry, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Anthony Watts

Section Editor information

  1. No affiliation provided

    Franca Fraternali

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© 2018 European Biophysical Societies’ Association (EBSA)

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Shifman, J., Singh, A. (2018). Computational Protein Design. In: Roberts, G., Watts, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Biophysics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35943-9_10084-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35943-9_10084-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-35943-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-35943-9

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