Abstract: Proteins are very important biological molecules of living organisms, made up of hundreds of smaller units called amino acids. Proteins perform or catalyse nearly all biochemical and mechanical processes in biological cells. Most proteins spontaneously fold into one or a small number of favoured three-dimensional structures which play crucial biological roles in growth, development, metabolism and everyday functioning in living organisms. From the 1950s scientists were involved in solving the problem of three-dimensional (3D) structure of a given protein because it was highly important in biology and medicine. In 1962 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to British scientists Max Perutz and John Kendrew for their pioneering work in determining the structure of globular proteins (Myoglobin and Haemoglobin). Their discovery laid the foundation for structural biology, which interprets molecular level biological mechanisms in terms of the structures of proteins.Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin from Oxford University won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry after researching for years to develop protein structure prediction by X-ray crystallography and her most influential discoveries were the confirmation of the structure of Insulin, Penicillin and the structure of Vitamin B12, Several scientific methods were developed over the last 50 years to determine the 3D structure of proteins. The most important are currently the X-ray crystallography, the NMR Spectroscopy, Electron Microscopy ad Cryo-Electron Microscopy. The field of computational protein prediction from the amino acid sequence evolved in many research projects for many years following the rapid increase in computational power of super fast computers, with advanced computational programming and the development of intelligent algorithms. Although over decades structural biologists determined thousands of protein structures, they encountered numerous difficulties. So, the promise of in silico methodology or computational approach and clever algorithms for predicting protein structure from amino acid sequence was very welcomed. This review presents selected computational methods that have made significant strides in predicting 3D protein structures from amino acid sequence. From 1994 there is an international contest for protein structure prediction by computational methods: CASP Critical Assessment Structure Prediction, where most of these platforms achieve top status with successful predictions.
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