Protein homology modeling in phytochemical research

Abstract

The advancements in phytochemical research have offered a number of promising innovations within the field of pharmaceuticals. However, the lack of knowledge related to 3D phytochemical structures has greatly hindered the progress in the field of therapeutic drug discovery and understanding the roles of phytochemicals in biological respects. In recent years, there has been a rapid rise in the number of tools allowing the users to access the modeling methods through a broad spectrum of techniques. In most of the cases, there is a lack of experimental data pertaining to specific structures. However, the most reliable method to obtain structural information construct models is based on the known structural information from homologous proteins. This process is referred to as homology modeling. Advances in homology modeling will provide a number of critical applications in drug design/discovery and is believed to offer a variety of novel research applications with respect to the discovery of novel phytoconstituents. This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive introduction and guide to commonly applied homology modeling tools.