Description:
The book is unique in that it bridges the gap between bioinformaticists and molecular biologists, i.e. the developers and the users of computational methods for biological data analysis and in that it presents examples of practical applications of the bioinformatics tools in the "daily practice" of an experimental research scientist. The book starts with reviews on computational methods for protein sequence-structure- function analysis (sequence studies, structure prediction), followed by methods that explicitly utilize experimental data routinely obtained in the laboratory to improve the functional predictions. The second part comprises a series of examples on how particular applications of different types of bioinformatics methods in combination with experimental studies to validate the hypotheses have led to important scientific discoveries. Therefore, the book is a guide to application of bioinformatics methods in molecular biology, addressed mainly to the research scientists, postdocs, and advanced graduate students. TOC:Computational Methods for Protein Structure Prediction and Fold Recognition.- 'Meta' Approaches to Protein Structure Prediction.- From Molecular Modeling to Drug Design.- Structure Determination of Macromolecular Complexes by Experiment and Computation.- Modeling Protein Folding Pathways.- Structural Bioinformatics and NMR Structure Determination.- Bioinformatics- Guided Identification and Experimental Characterization of Novel RNA Methyltransferases.- Finding Missing tRNA Modification Genes: A Comparative Genomics Goldmine.- Evolution and Function of Processosome, the Complex That Assembles Ribosomes in Eukaryotes: Clues from Comparative Sequence Analysis.- Bioinformatics-Guided Experimental Characterization of Mismatch-Repair Enzymes and Their Relatives.- Predicting Functional Residues in DNA Glycosylases by Analysis of Structure and Conservation.-