Additional Information Projects AI Lab Personnel Dr. Vasant Honavar , Principal Investigator. Drena Dobbs , Co-Principal Investigator. Proteins are abundant in all organisms and are indeed fundamental to life. The diversity of protein structure underlies the very large range of their function.
Proteins are linear heteropolymers of fixed length.
That is, a single type of protein always has the same number and composition of monomers, but different proteins have a range of monomer units, from a few tens to approximately a thousand. The monomers are amino acids, and there are 20 types, which themselves have a range of chemical properties. There is therefore a great diversity of possible protein sequences. The three-dimensional structures of proteins are therefore also extremely diverse, ranging from completely fibrous, to globular. Recent advances in genome sequencing projects have led to enormous increase in protein sequence data.