Computational approaches for the design and prediction of protein-protein interactions

Abstract

There is a large class of applications in computational structural biology for which atomic-level representation is crucial for understanding the underlying biological phenomena, yet explicit atomic-level modeling is computationally prohibitive. Computational protein design, homology modeling, protein interaction prediction, docking and structure recognition are among these applications. Models that are commonly applied to these problems combine atomic-level representation with assumptions and approximations that make them computationally feasible. In this thesis I focus on several aspects of this type of modeling, analyze its limitations, propose improvements and explore applications to the design and prediction of protein-protein interactions.