A Survey on Protein Target Identification using Classification and Prediction

Abstract

In an era that has been dominated by Structural Biology for the last 30-40 years, a dramatic change of focus towards sequence analysis has spurred the advent of the genome projects and the resultant diverging sequence/structure deficit. The central challenge of Computational Structural Biology is therefore to rationalize the mass of sequence information into biochemical and biophysical knowledge and to decipher the structural, functional and evolutionary clues encoded in the language of biological sequences. In investigating the meaning of sequences, two distinct analytical themes have emerged: in the first approach, pattern recognition techniques are used to detect similarity between sequences and hence to infer related structures and functions; in the second prediction methods are used to deduce 3D structure and ultimately to Infer function, directly from the linear sequence. In this article, we Attempt to Provide a Critical assessment of what one may and may not expect from the biological sequences to identify Major issues yet to be resolved.