Structural and Evolutionary Relationships among Protein

With the current access to the whole genomes of various organisms and the completion of the first draft of the human genome, there is a strong need for a structure-function classi-fication of protein families as an initial step in moving from DNA databases to a comprehensive understanding of human biology. As a result of the explosion in nucleic acid sequence information and the concurrent development of methods for high-throughput functional characterization of gene products, the genomic revolution also promises to provide a new para-digm for drug discovery, enabling the identification of molec-ular drug targets in a significant number of human diseases. This molecular view of diseases has contributed to the impor-tance of combining primary sequence data with three-dimen-sional structure and has increased the awareness of computa-tional homology modeling and its potential to elucidat