Chothia, Cyrus

On the basis of simple considerations of connected motifs, Michael Leviff and Cyrus Chothia of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology derived a taxonomy of protein structures and have classified domain structures into three main groups a domains, p domains, and a/p domains. In ct structures the core is built up exclusively from a helices (see Figure 2.9) in p structures the core comprises antiparallel p sheets and are usually two P sheets packed... 

Arthur Lesk and Cyrus Chothia at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, compared the family of globin strucfures with the aim of answering two general questions How can amino acid sequences that are very different form proteins that are very similar in their three-dimensional structure What is the mechanism by which proteins adapt to mutations in the course of their evolution ... 

The first requirement for threading is to have a database of all the known different protein folds. Eisenberg has used his own library of about 800 folds, which represents a minimally redundant set of the more than 6000 structures deposited at the Protein Data Bank. Other groups use databases available on the World Wide Web, where the folds are hierarchically ordered according to structural and functional similarities, such as SCOP, designed by Alexey Murzin and Cyrus Chothia in Cambridge, UK. 

We thank Paul Bash and Stephen Brenner for participation in the initial stages of the work described in this article. We are grateful to Cyrus Chothia, Mark Gerstein, and Sarah Teichmann for providing preprints and useful discussions. 

We would like to thank Dr. Vinod Bhakuni for his assistance in the hydrogen bond and a-lactalbumin calculations, Prof. Cyrus Chothia for making ASA data available, and Prof. Peter Privalov for many helpful discussions. 

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