10
Protein Volumes
- Why Calculate?
- Protein interiors are tightly packed, fitting together like a jig-saw
puzzle.
- Because of tight packing
the various types of protein residues and atoms occupy well-defined amounts
of space.
- Tight packing is a driving force in ligand binding and is essential in the specificity of
various recognition processes (e.g. antibodies and antigens)
- Protein packing is interesting because
other molecules have very different types of packing. For instance, water
structure is dominated by H-bonding rather than tight packing.