Protein Homology Modeling Basics

Homology modeling is a bioinformatics technique used to predict the unknown structure of proteins from known homologues. The key to this technique is that if a two proteins have a similar sequence then eventually they should have similar structure and hence share the same function. Due to the advances in the field of high-throughput sequencing there is an explosion of data at sequence level. But experimental determination of all the structure corresponding to the sequences involves the bottleneck of overexpressing, purifying and crystallizing the protein molecules. Even though when purification and crystallization is achieved, accurate determination of molecular structure from X-ray data becomes a challenge. All crystals do no yield good quality data due to a variety of reasons. To address this issue Biologist use the homology modelling technique to predict the structure of unknown proteins from known homologues. In this course you will learn all the micro steps involved in predicting the structure of proteins using homology modeling using the popular tool called MODELLER. The steps involve appropriate selection of template, alignment of template and the target sequence, model building, loop refinement and model evaluation.