Protein-protein interaction modeling and inhibition: The TAU Bioinfo3D perspective

Protein-protein interactions are central to cell function. In order to fully understand these interactions, one has to elucidate the three-dimensional structures of the underlying complexes. While experimental methods have advanced significantly in the last decade, there are still few structures of protein complexes in the Protein Data Bank. Reliable computational techniques are required to fill in this gap. Better understanding of protein-protein interactions has also opened a large number of potential targets for the pharmaceutical industry, which previously viewed these interactions as "undruggable". In this review, we focus on the algorithms developed by the Tel Aviv University Structural Bioinformatics (Bioinfo3D) Lab to model protein-protein interactions, and on a preliminary attempt to search for peptide inhibitors for these interactions. All the algorithms presented are among the fastest available today and can be accessed via the group web server.