The deepest goal is the transfer of information from well-studied proteins
to your protein of interest.
The tools are database look-up, and comparison software. MRS to look up known proteins; BLAST to search for homologous proteins. We will use a few databases in this course: SwissProt holds well annotated protein sequences; PDB holds protein structures; EMBL holds nucleotide sequences.
We will also make excursions to OMIM that holds information about (human) genetic disorders cause by mutations, and to PROSITE which is a collection of patterns and motifs that are representative for protein families or functionalities. But these two things you cannot know yet at the beginning of the course.