The Burnham Institute in California has been awarded a grant to develop modern tools for comparing protein structures by treating them, true to their real character, as flexible entities. Because of the limitations of the currently available protein analysis and comparison tools, a whole class of questions about changes in protein structure cannot be addressed with publicly available software tools. The preliminary results of the flexible protein structure alignment algorithm developed at the Burnham Institute suggest that it will be able to address many of the shortcomings of the rigid body structure comparison programs.
