Protein structure and function modeling

Template-based modeling that employs various meta-threading techniques is currently the most accurate, and consequently the most commonly used, approach to predict protein structures. We developed eThread, a highly accurate meta-threading procedure to identify structural templates followed by the construction of the corresponding target-template alignments and 3D models. We also extended the functionality of eThread to select functional templates covering a broad spectrum of protein molecular function, including ligand, metal, inorganic cluster, protein and nucleic acid binding. We demonstrated that in addition to accurate protein structure modeling, meta-threading effectively detects many facets of molecular function, even in a low sequence identity regime.