Practical 3

Main chain tracing

Aims

• To give practice in reading and summarising a research article.

Objectives

After this practical you will be able to:

• describe bioinformatics problems and computational approaches to solving them;
• summarise problems and methods described in research articles

Exercise

In this exercise you will summarise the problem and computational solution that are described in:

• R. J. Morris, A. Perrakis and V. S. Lamzin (2002) ARP/wARP's model-building algorithms. I. The main chain. Acta Cryst., D58, 968-974. doi:10.1107/S0907444902005462

After reading your document the reader should:

• understand the computational problem that is being addressed in the paper;
• understand what needs to be done to implement a solution to the problem;
• recognise that computing science students (particularly those with some experience with algorithms) have the knowledge and skills that are needed to address this problem and implement a solution.

You can make the following assumptions about the reader:

• the reader's knowledge and background in computing science is similar to your own;
• the reader is aware that proteins consist of chains of amino acid residues, and that each amino acid residue has a central carbon atom called the alpha-carbon.

You should use a clear and straightforward writing style. You do not need to descibe every aspect or every computational step in the paper by Morris et al. (2002). You may refer to other research articles in your document.

What to submit

You should submit a PDF file via the Fire system before 23:59 on Monday 1 December 2014.