Proteins are polymers that are composed of a linear sequence of amino acids.
Proteins spontaneously fold into complex three dimensional structures that are responsible for performing the bulk of the biochemical functions in living systems. These biochemical functions depend on complementarity of shape between interacting partners. Consequently, much can be learned about a protein of unknown function by identifying well characterized proteins that are similar in shape, or homologous in structure, to the unknown protein. This presentation will provide a brief introduction to protein structure and then discuss the current status of computational methods to detect structural homology between a large number of proteins.