[posted & mailed]
zerohourx at yahoo.com wrote:
Instead of answering your questions in a specific manner (I think there
are people out there who are more able to do that) I'd suggest to you
to work your way through the first few chapters of any good biochemistry
or molecular biology text. I'm a bit out-of-touch with recent books
about biochemistry or molecular biology, but I'd recommend either
Lubert Stryer's "Biochemistry", Donald & Judith Voet's "Biochemistry",
or Harvey Lodishs et al. "Molecular Cell Biology". All of these books
contain very good introductory chapters, especially one about proteins,
which should give you some feeling what proteins are and how they
behave.
There is a wide variety of fields to choose from. Big problems to tackle
are the protein folding problem (i.e. to predict the three-dimensional
structure of a protein from its sequence) and the ability to extract
sensible data from the vast amount of sequence information that has
recently become available.
> 4. Can you list a few computer programs that exist that have been quite
> popular with researchers. How have they helped? Any demos exist? Pricing?
I believe that one of the most popular molbio programs is rasmol. It is
a protein structure viewer, and it has probably done more to familiarize
biologists and biochemists with protein structure than all introductory
texts about the matter together.
--Cornelius.
--
/* Cornelius Krasel, U Wuerzburg, Dept. of Pharmacology, Versbacher Str. 9 */
/* D-97078 Wuerzburg, Germany email: krasel at wpxx02.toxi.uni-wuerzburg.de */
/* "Science is the game we play with God to find out what His rules are." */
