Proteomic Tools for the Analysis of Cytoskeleton Proteins

Proteomic tools have become an essential part of the tool kit of the molecular biologist, and provide techniques for detecting homologous sequences, recognizing functional domains, modeling, and analyzing the three-dimensional structure for any given protein sequence. Although a wealth of structural and functional information is available for a large number of members of the various classes of cytoskeletal proteins, many more members remain uncharacterized. These computational tools that are freely and easily accessible to the scientific community provide an excellent starting point to predict the structural and functional properties of such partially or fully uncharacterized protein sequences, and can lead to elegantly designed experiments to probe the hypothesized function. This chapter discusses various proteomic analysis tools with a focus on protein structure and function predictions.