ABSTRACT
This chapter constructs and tests descriptors for structural motifs used for the binding of different nucleotides. Nucleotide-binding X-ray structures share the following fold: a center beta-strand followed by a turn and an alpha-helix which lies parallel to the plane of the beta-strand. In order to facilitate the investigations of the semantic and syntactic structure of this genetic language, two major efforts are currently receiving strong support: the continued generation of more sequence and structural data and its organization into modern databases. The chapter also constructs a single descriptor that specifically locates common structural motifs within dissimilar primary sequences, using only information inferred from the primary sequence. Consider the analogy between nature's language of molecular genetics and human language, a simple analogy often used in beginning biology classes. Molecular genetics represents a living language with a long evolutionary history of many interacting dialects, again not unlike human languages with their cultural and historical.
