Macromolecular Modeling Blog ™

Over the past decade it has become evident that many proteins have disordered regions, even in their native states. Moreover, entire proteins were found to be intrinsically disordered. These have several names, such as disordered proteins, unstructured proteins, intrinsically unfolded proteins, and others, as well as several functions, but perhaps the most studied function is their binding to different proteins in the cell.

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G-protein coupled receptors comprise a large family of receptors that mediates signal transduction pathways. This family is extremely important and is the hub of drug discovery efforts. A recent market research reports that GPCR targeted drugs which now account for 25% of the pharmaceutical market are expected to increase market share to nearly 50% by 2012. While major pharma companies are increasingly entering into collaborations with GPCR platform development companies leading to pathbreaking drug discoveries. From the structural biology point of view it was just recently that a second crystal structure of a GPCR was solved, meaning that huge efforts are still necessary in modeling these important targets. To aid the ongoing efforts, we present a collection of online GPCR resources. 

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