Conclusions
The holy grail of computational biology is the elucidation, at a molecular, cellular and biological level, of function.
As we tried to illustrate here, several routes are being followed to address the problem, each having advantages and pitfalls. The present challenge is to use our understanding of protein evolution to develop accurate methods for large-scale automatic assignment of function. At present, the level of accuracy with which we can predict function on the basis of genomic sequences is still dependent on the specific case considered, namely on the size of the family of the target protein and on its evolutionary distance from members of known function. The continuous growth of the number of available protein sequences and the coordinated effort of many research groups hold the promise that experimental biologists will soon be able to add reliable functional assignment tools to the suite of the many computational methods that are already part of their laboratory toolbox.
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Tramontano, A., Cozzetto, D. (2005). The Relationship Between Protein Sequence, Structure and Function. In: Pifat-Mrzljak, G. (eds) Supramolecular Structure and Function 8. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-306-48662-8_2
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