Review: Protein design - Where we were, where we are, where we're going

Protein design has become a powerful approach for understanding the relatio nship between amino acid sequence and 3-dimensional structure. In the past 5 years, there have been many breakthroughs in the development of computati onal methods that allow the selection of novel sequences given the structur e of a protein backbone. Successful design of protein scaffolds has now pav ed the way for new endeavors to design function. The. ability to design seq uences compatible with a fold may also be useful in structural and function al genomics by expanding the range of proteins used for fold recognition an d for the identification of functionally important domains from multiple se quence alignments. (C) 2001 Academic Press.