edited by Colin Kleanthous. Oxford University Press (2000) 314 pages. ISBN 0-19-963760-1 £65
Protein-protein recognition is at the heart of almost all intracellular and extracellular communication. Signalling pathways, respiration, enzyme regulation and the immune response all involve processes that are based on interactions between proteins, indicating that such interactions are involved in cellular responses at various levels.
Although most of our knowledge of the microcosmos of the cellular world is based on protein-protein interactions, our knowledge of the molecular/structural basis of these interactions is very limited. In the so-called postgenomic era, bioinformatics is developing tools (algorithms) to predict protein-protein interactions on the basis of the information deposited in the ever-expanding sequence databases. This means that we know many proteins interact, but we do not know how. However, molecular biologists, physicists and chemists have developed a large repertoire of methods to explore protein-protein recognition.
Colin Kleanthous has now taken the time...
