Structural Bioinformatics

Structural bioinformatics is a sub discipline of bioinformatics that deals with the three dimensional structures of biomolecules. This field portrays the goals to create methods for manipulating information about biological macromolecules and the application of these methods to solve problems in biology and creating new knowledge. It attempts to model and discover the basic principles underlying biological machinery at the molecular level. Structural bioinformatics combines applications of physical and chemical principles with algorithms from computational science. With the success of the genome sequencing projects, the evolution of high-throughput methods for expression analysis and compound identification, structural bioinformatics is now resurgent and is doing its part to accelerate the drug discovery process. The techniques that structural bioinformatics involves are particularly valuable in the area from target identification to lead discovery. Structural bioinformatics can be used for function and ligand prediction in the case of novel targets.