Dr. Helen M. Berman, Director of the Protein Database (PDB), Rutgers University. Dr. Berman is internationally renowned for her development of protein and nucleic acid databases. Her research interest is in the application of Bioinformatics to protein structure.

Background That the structure determines the function of proteins is a central paradigm in biology. However, protein functions are more directly related to cooperative effects at the residue and multi-residue scales. As such, current representations based on atomic coordinates can be considered inadequate. Bridging the gap between atomic-level structure and overall protein-level functionality requires parameterizations of the protein structure (and other physicochemical...

The Wiggle series are support vector machine–based predictors that identify regions of functional flexibility using only protein sequence information. Functionally flexible regions are defined as regions that can adopt different conformational states and are assumed to be necessary for bioactivity. Many advances have been made in understanding the relationship between protein sequence and structure. This work contributes to those efforts by making strides to understand the relationship...

The protein kinase family is large and important, but it is only one family in a larger superfamily of homologous kinases that phosphorylate a variety of substrates and play important roles in all three superkingdoms of life. We used a carefully constructed structural alignment of selected kinases as the basis for a study of the structural evolution of the protein kinase–like superfamily. The comparison of structures revealed a “universal core” domain consisting only of...