The Roles and Application of Protein Modeling in Biomedical Research

In all living organisms, proteins carry out essential biological processes. The biological function of a protein depends on the building blocks of amino acids that fold into three-dimensional architecture. Understanding the protein structure-function relationship will, therefore, allow the generation of hypotheses on how to inhibit, control, or modify protein for better use in biomedical research, especially when dealing with emerging infectious diseases. Due to the exponential growth of protein sequence data but not the structural data, protein modeling thus provides an alternative approach to shed some light on the structure of a protein. Protein modeling has the advantage of solving the protein structure as it is relatively faster and cost-effective than experimental means. With the availability of the structural information of a protein, the function of the protein can be further understood. Hence, rational engineering or protein design with improved functionality can be performed and can be useful in biomedical research. This highlights the increasing importance of protein modeling in biomedical studies. This chapter provides a brief overview of existing protein modeling techniques. The applications of protein modeling in recent biomedical research are also summarized here.

Keywords: Protein structure prediction, Template-based modeling, Template-free modeling.