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| Anna Tramontano - | |
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The availability of the complete genomic sequences of many species,
including human, has raised enormous expectations in medicine,
pharmacology, ecology, biotechnology and forensic sciences.
However, knowledge is only a first step toward understanding,
and we are only at the early stage of a scientific process that
might lead us to satisfy all the expectations raised by the genomic
projects.
Once the coding regions of a genome have been identified, they can be
'translated' into the sequence of their products, for example
proteins and RNA molecules and we can address the question of which
is their function.
Defining function in biology is non trivial. Each gene product has a
molecular, biological and cellular function. Furthermore, molecular
function can be defined at different levels of detail. For example,
thrombin is part of the blood coagulation cascade and is an
extracellular enzyme, whose molecular function can be characterized
(with increasing resolution) as an enzyme, a hydrolase, a peptidase,
an endopeptidase, a protease, a serine protease, and finally,
as thrombin.
If we want to interfere with the activity of a gene product for
medical or biotechnological purposes, we need to know its function
at the molecular, biological and cellular level. Only in this case
we can try to interfere with the biological process by, for example,
inhibiting its molecular function with a drug targeted to the
appropriate cellular compartment.
By and large, there are three routes we can take to elucidate the
function of a gene product: we can perform experiments, search for
evolutionary related gene products whose function has already been
characterized, or try to compute its three-dimensional shape and use
it to infer function. I will describe recent developments in methods
based on the latter approach mostly focusing on their reliability.
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