Protein structure computing in the genomic era

Functional analysis of the proteins discovered in fully sequenced genomes r epresents the next major challenge of life science research. Computational methods play a crucial role in this activity and, among them, comparative p rotein modelling is of great assistance during the rational design of mutag enesis experiments. Our aim over the last several years has been to further the use of 3-D model structures in this field. Therefore, we have develope d a comparative protein modelling environment composed of the Swiss-PdbView er (sequence to structure workbench and viewing program), SWISS-MODEL (inte rnet-based server for model generation) and a database of a model generated with 3DCrunch. (C) 2000 Editions scientifiques et medicales Elsevier SAS.