Lipari School on BioInformatics and Computational Biology
Jacob T. Schwartz International School for Scientific ResearchMichael Levitt, Stanford University, USA
Introduction to Protein Three-Dimensional Structure and the Architecture of Drug Binding Sites
Protein three-dimensional structures are precise and are stabilized by
physical interactions between their atoms. These same interactions govern
whether a particular drug molecule will interact with a particular protein,
where it will bind and how strongly this binding will be. Over 50 years of
protein crystallography have provided the structures of thousands of
proteins many of which are in complexes with a drug molecule. Although each
system is unique, there are interesting general rules that will be
presented. These rules provide a simple physical view of interactions that
are of fundamental importance to all of biology as well as of immense
biomedical significance.