- How are 3D macromolecular structures obtained?
Crystallography, NMR, and homology modeling.
- What fraction of the human proteome has known tertiary structure?
A few percent.
- Is Structural Genomics the answer?
Not in the next few years.
- Not all proteins must adopt a uniform, stable fold
in order to function -- there are
intrinsicially unstructured proteins.
About 10% of proteins are thought to be fully disordered to support
their functions, and 40% of eukaryotic proteins have at least one
long disordered region.
Examples.
by
Eric Martz, University of Massachusetts, July 2003. Revised October 2005.