RNA structure comparison is a fundamental problem in structural biology, structural chemistry, and bioinformatics. It can be used for analysis of RNA energy landscapes, conformational switches, and facilitating RNA structure prediction. The purpose of our integrated tool RNACluster is twofold: to provide a platform for computing and comparison of different distances between RNA secondary struct...

Here, we describe BioInfo3D, a suite of freely available web services for protein structural analysis. The FlexProt method performs flexible structural alignment of protein molecules. FlexProt simultaneously detects the hinge regions and aligns the rigid subparts of the molecules. It does not require an a priori knowledge of the flexible hinge regions. MultiProt and MASS perform simultaneous co...

This chapter deals with approaches for protein three-dimensional structure prediction, starting out from a single input sequence with unknown structure, the ‘query’ or ‘target’ sequence. Both template based and template free modelling techniques are treated, and how resulting structural models may be selected and refined. We give a concrete flowchart for how to decide which modelling strategy i...

The storage and analysis of biological data using certain algorithms and computer softwares is called bioinformatics. The applications that bioinformatics offer to the civilized world are more than just being a researcher's tool for structural and functional analysis. Development and implementation of computational algorithms and software tools facilitate an understanding of the biological proc...

Many bioinformatics problems are very hard to solve optimally and within polynomial time of their size. This motivates the use of heuristics in bioinformatics. The present thesis constitutes research into the design and analysis of efficient heuristic algorithms of practical usage for solving biological problems. The research made in this thesis can be related to three main objectives: 1) The d...

Prolactin is mainly secreted by the anterior pituitary and is able to stimulate mammary gland development and lactation in mammalians. Although prolactins share a common ancestral gene encoding, they show species specific characteristics and their efficiency may be different in various mammals. The importance of protein structures of all sequences of this hormone have been studied by various bi...

Biomedical Proteomics Research Group, Department of Structural Biology and Bioinformatics, University of Geneva, 1 Rue Michel Servet, 1211 Geneva 14, Switzerland; Proteome Informatics Group, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Geneva, Switzerland; and Instituto de Productos Lácteos de Asturias, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientı́ficas (CSIC), Ctra. Infiesto s/n, 33300 Villaviciosa, Asturi...

The spread of bioinformatics centres across India is primarily due to the extensive infrastructure and network that was initiated way back in 1980s by S. Ramachandran, the first Secretary of the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India, and is being supported at 168 locations across the country. Anticipating the dawn of bioinformatics globally as an integration of informatics and ...