Comparative protein structure modelling

A prerequisite to understand cell functioning on the system level is the knowledge of three-dimensional protein structures that mediate biochemical interactions. The explosion in the number of available gene sequences set the stage for the next step in genome scale projects, to obtain three dimensional structures for each protein. To achieve this ambitious goal, the costly and slow structure determination experiments are boosted with theoretical approaches. The current state and recent advances in structure modelling approaches are reviewed here, with special emphasis on comparative structure modelling techniques.