Bioinformatic tools to understand structure and function of plant proteins

Abstract Proteins are essential for life processes in living system and their involvement in the biological processes is crucial for existence and survival of the organisms. Scientific community is relentlessly investing into tools and technologies to understand the hidden mysteries of protein structure and function. The branch of molecular biology that aims to understand genes (genomics) and proteins (proteomics) has enormously benefitted from the advances in computational methods. The area of computer-based protein research has come across major developments during the last few decades. Handling and analysis of ever-increasing biological data have now been feasible with the help of computational techniques. Computer-assisted structural and functional characterization of proteins has witnessed remarkable advancements during recent years. This present chapter provides a comprehensive overview of recent advances in computational approaches developed to study structural and functional characterization of proteins and its use in crop improvement.