Computational protein design, from single domain soluble proteins to membrane proteins

Computational protein design is becoming more and more important in both understanding the fundamental biological roles of proteins and facilitating their utilization in biotechnology. Based upon the significant progress in our understanding of protein folding, development of efficient sequence and conformational search algorithms and accurate scoring functions, and ever increasing computational resources, great progress has been made in design of single domain soluble proteins. There are also reports of membrane protein design, albeit very limited. This tutorial review will give a brief introduction, the state of the art, and future prospects and implications of protein design in improving healthcare and environment. The interplay between protein design, molecular simulations and experiments will be presented to emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of the field.