SCHEMA is a computational
algorithm used in
protein engineering
Protein engineering is the process of developing useful or valuable proteins. It is a young discipline, with much research taking place into the understanding of protein folding and recognition for protein design principles. It has been used to imp ...
to identify fragments of
proteins
Proteins are large biomolecules and macromolecules that comprise one or more long chains of amino acid residues. Proteins perform a vast array of functions within organisms, including catalysing metabolic reactions, DNA replication, respo ...
(called ''schemas'') that can be
recombined without disturbing the integrity of the proteins'
three-dimensional structure. The algorithm calculates the
interactions between a protein's different
amino acid residues to determine which interactions may be disrupted by swapping structural
domains of the protein. By minimizing these disruptions, SCHEMA can be used to engineer
chimeric proteins that stably
fold and may have altered function relative to their parent proteins. SCHEMA algorithm has been applied in the recombinant libraries of distantly related β-lactamases.
References
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Bioinformatics algorithms