Protein Tertiary Structure (Paperback)

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In biochemistry and molecular biology, the tertiary structure of a protein or any other macromolecule is its three-dimensional structure, as defined by the atomic coordinates. Tertiary structure is considered to be largely determined by the protein's primary structure - the sequence of amino acids of which it is composed. Efforts to predict tertiary structure from the primary structure are known generally as protein structure prediction. However, the environment in which a protein is synthesized and allowed to fold are significant determinants of its final shape and are usually not directly taken into account by current prediction methods. Most such methods do rely on comparisons between the sequence to be predicted and sequences of known structure in the Protein Data Bank and thus account for environment indirectly, assuming the target and template sequences share similar cellular contexts.