A new library of surface patches - design and applications

Protein surfaces serve as an interface with the molecular environment and are thus tightly bound to proteins' function. On the surface, geometric and chemical complementarity to other molecules providesinteraction specificity for ligand binding, docking of bio-macromolecules, and enzymatic catalysis.As of today, there is no accepted general scheme to represent protein surfaces. Furthermore, most ofthe research on protein surface focuses on regions of specific interest such as interaction, ligand binding anddocking sites. We present here a more general approach for surface representation, as we wish to study theentire surface regardless of its functional roles.