Outline of thesis

The broad scope of this chapter has been necessary to introduce properly the work presented in this thesis, which is centred around protein interactions and protein structure prediction, and draws upon knowledge of protein structure, function and classification. In Chapter 2, the diverse interactions of antibodies with other molecules are analysed and discussed; work which has also been published[MacCallum et al., 1996]. Then in Chapter 3, approaches to the prediction of secondary structural class and fold architecture are explored. In Chapter 4 this is taken further with a novel sequence alignment-based method for fold topology recognition, called SIVA. With fold recognition in mind, Chapter 5 is concerned with the processing of structural and sequence information using self-organising maps. In the final chapter, some general conclusions are made and possible future approaches to the computational analysis of protein sequence and structure are discussed.