ABSTRACT
Understanding biochemical functions and the cellular roles of proteins is one of the ultimate goals in biochemistry, and has a very high importance for biotechnology and medicine, particularly for drug design. Experimental studies aimed at giving insights into protein functions include methods for the determination of expression, localization, structure, biochemical activity, protein-protein interactions, and protein-ligand interactions. In addition, there are several computer-based techniques and approaches available that can be used to predict protein binding sites with ligands, protein structures, and functions. Development of new computational methods and algorithms has become more important than ever as we have entered a postgenomic era where many large-scale genome sequencing projects have provided us with a tremendous amount of data, including new putative protein sequences, but without clues to their functions. In Part III, some of the mentioned methods are introduced and the relevant issues are discussed.
