Structures of macromolecular complexes are necessary for a mechanistic description of biochemical and cellular processes. They can be solved by experimental methods, such as X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy and electron microscopy, as well as by computational protein structure prediction, docking and bioinformatics. Recent advances and applications of these methods emphasize the need for...

How protein molecules pack into a crystal remains problematic. Packing units are direct materials for packing into crystals. The group generator method is introduced for automatically identifying the packing unit. By introducing deviations into the nucleation stage of crystallization, we proved that these deviations diminish in further packing. This process illus trates how translation symmetri...

Structural bioinformatics provides new tools for investigating protein-protein interactions at the molecular level. We present two types of structural descriptors for efficiently representing and comparing protein-protein binding sites and surface patches. The descriptors are based on distributions of distances between five types of functional atoms, thereby capturing the spatial arrangement of...

cytochrome-c (cyt-c) is an electron transport protein, and it is present throughout the evolution. more than 280 sequences have been reported in the protein sequence database (www.uniprot.org). though sequentially diverse, cyt-c has essentially retained its tertiary structure or fold. thus a vast data set of varied sequences with retention of similar structure and function makes it a primary ca...

Human serum albumin has been used as a model protein for protein folding and ligand binding studies over many decades. Due to its long life period and high concentration in plasma, HSA is highly sensitive to glycation. It is reported that 175 mg/dL glucose concentration is a threshold of kidney activity for the beginning of excretion of glucose. pH denaturation of HSA in absence and presence of...

Human serum albumin has been used as a model protein for protein folding and ligand binding studies over many decades. Due to its long life period and high concentration in plasma, HSA is highly sensitive to glycation. It is reported that 175 mg/dL glucose concentration is a threshold of kidney activity for the beginning of excretion of glucose. pH denaturation of HSA in absence and presence of...

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...