In Silico Protein Design

In silico protein design covers the computational techniques that are most frequently utilized by protein engineers. The advent of biotechnology has made proteins play an increasingly important role as medicinal therapeutics, catalysts in the chemical process industries, and numerous other applications. Many of these applications are dependent on the field of protein engineering to either modify existing proteins to alter/enhance their functionality or to create novel proteins capable of novel functionality. In the last decade, the rapid advances made by the computer industry have allowed for the creation of computer systems capable of modelling proteins to become relatively commonplace. As such, there has been a marked increase in the use of computational methods to engineer proteins.