Engineering protein structure and function with computational protein design

Understanding molecular folding has important applications to understanding biology and to developing new therapeutics and new materials.~ Protein design also opens new ways to probe the determinants of folding and to facilitate the study of proteins. Such design is complicated, however, by~the conformational complexity of proteins and by the large numbers of possible sequences. Recent computational methods for identifying the properties of amino acid sequences likely to fold to a given three-dimensional structure will be presented. Several examples of structures so designed, which have been experimentally synthesized and characterized, will be presented.