Looking at Protein Structures

There is lots of free software available for mainipulating pdb data files. When looking at structures you can zoom into the active site and guess which residues would be important for enzyme activity. These are probably amino acids that will be conserved through evolution and it is very interesting when they change.

• PyMol is an excellent molecular visualization program which creates fantastic images suitable for publication.
• Expasy also links to many great programs such as...
• Swiss Pdb Viewer lets you look at pdb files. You can also do structural alignments of two different protein structures.