The Design and Structure Prediction of Protein Oligomers
Popular Abstract in English Proteins are a class of biological macromolecules that perform countless fundamental and diverse functions in living organisms. Chemically speaking, they are polymers built out of monomeric units called amino acids. All biological proteins are constructed out of 20 different amino-acid types. To form protein molecules, amino acids are linked together in a linear chain lThe minimum free energy state of a protein (the native state) is encoded by its amino-acid sequence. Due to the many torsional degrees of freedom (DOF) available to a polypeptide chain, a vast number of conformations is possible. Therefore, to predict the native state of a protein directly from sequence, a computer algorithm must evaluate a large number of possible conformations using accurate sco
