Proteins are the most prominent class of molecules in living
organisms. They catalyze reactions, maintain structure, generate
movements, sense signals, and serve other functions. Understanding
proteins and how they function is one major focus of biology and
computational biology.
Here, I will summarize some of our contributions. As protein function is
largely dictated by protein structure, structural models of proteins are
often the key to understanding function. We developed techniques for
predicting protein structure from sequence and for assessing the
reliability of these predictions. With known structures, appropriate
descriptors enable us to investigate functional properties of the
structures. I will show some examples of descriptors and applications.
Finally I will apply these techniques to predicting the molecular
function of a protein, once its structure is known. This work results in
a platform for investigating sequence, structure and molecular function
relationships