Protein and Nucleic Acid Folding: A Comprehensive Overview
Folding is the problem of taking a sequence (string) and predicting the structure (3D coordinates). Also called structure prediction, folding usually applies to proteins, but RNA folding is also studied. Protein structures are useful for understand how a protein functions and providing a starting point for making changes to improve the function. Because experimental structure determination using cryo-EM or crystallography are slow, expensive, and sometimes impossible, computational structure prediction can be very valuble.