Protein structural bioinformatics: An overview.

Proteins play a crucial role in organisms in nature. They are able to perform structural, catalytic, transport and defense functions in cells, among others. We understand that a variety of resources do exist to work with protein structural bioinformatics, which perform tasks such as protein modeling, protein docking, protein molecular dynamics, protein interaction, active and binding site prediction and mutation analysis.

GASS-Metal: identifying metal-binding sites on protein structures using genetic algorithms.

Metals are present in >30% of proteins found in nature and assist them to perform important biological functions, including storage, transport, signal transduction and enzymatic activity. Traditional and experimental techniques for metal-binding site prediction are usually costly and time-consuming, making computational tools that can assist in these predictions of significant importance. Here we present Genetic Active Site Search (GASS)-Metal, a new method for protein metal-binding site prediction.