Finding protein targets

Drug discovery the populations from which the samples are drawn may be healthy and disease tissues. A possible use of the comparison of gene expressions is to find protein targets that might intervene with the disease process. 

To maximize safety and therapeutic efficacy, potential drugs are required to be highly specific for their protein target and orally bioavailable. In addition, for a drug candidate to reach the market, it must be patentably novel. A computational approach therefore needs to find novel compounds with well-defined pharmacological properties from the vast space of possible organic compounds ( chemical space ). 

Protein target families are the fundamentals to build a framework for matching biological motifs with chemical scaffolds. Many structurally related targets find implications in different therapeutic areas, while exhibiting similar protein-ligand... 

In addition to finding small organic molecules that bind to a protein, covalent capture methods can identify peptides that interact with proteins. Kohda and colleagues used this approach to study the mitochondrial protein Tom20, an import receptor that recognizes an epitope on proteins targeted for the mitochondria.1301 Previous work had characterized this epitope as a five-residue peptide that assumes an amphiphilic helical conformation, and coarse sequence preferences had been worked out. However, Tom20 has both low affinity... 

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