ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how structural assignments to proteomes can help someone understand the evolution of protein families in complete genomes, in multidomain proteins and in their functional context in cells such as in metabolic pathways. It introduces some common methods and databases for structural assignment to genome sequences. The chapter explains the connection to experimental structural genomics projects. It discusses insights into proteome and protein evolution gained using these methods. The chapter also discusses a particular example of structural assignments to an entire molecular system: the enzymes of small molecule metabolism in Escherichia coli. Structural assignments to almost the entire set of small molecule metabolism in this model organism have provided a better understanding of enzyme and pathway evolution. Computational structural genomics is fundamental to understanding and ordering the large-scale experimental data produced in the postgenomic era. Structural assignment of proteins of unknown structure has practical applications in terms of homology modelling and understanding functional properties of proteins.
