This course is aimed at biologists who wish to get acquainted with protein structure visualization.
After a short introduction on protein structure, the whole course will be centered around the practical utilization of Swiss-PdbViewer.
In particular, you will learn how to
- look at a structure, both globally (as a fold) or in detail (e.g. an active site)
- compare several structures to identify differences
- identify residues participating in protein-protein interactions
- understand the limits of energy minimization
- make a crude model to visualize the result of genetic mutations onto a protein structure.
To maximize the learning experience, the course is structured as a practical demonstration that students can follow repeating the same operation on their own laptop.
At the end of the course, the students will be presented with a few questions that they will have to answer using their newly acquired structural knowledge.