Bioinformatic Methods for Enzyme Identification

Bioinformatic methods for sequence analysis of homologous DNA or protein sequences are nowadays basic tools in biological sciences, whether for determining the sequence identity of two protein or DNA molecules, finding homologous sequences of a known enzyme, or analyzing complex relationships of whole organisms. This chapter describes different bioinformatic methods and respective tools that will enable you to search for new protein sequences, which are homologous to a known search sequence, in public sequence databases, to align those homologous protein sequences in multiple sequence alignments and to infer their phylogenetic relationships in the form of a phylogenetic tree.