ST. LOUIS, Mo.--Tripos has announced the release of GeneFold, a protein fold identification software tool developed in collaboration with Jeffrey Skolnick and Adam Godzik, professors at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. GeneFold is the first product launched as the result of a two-year agreement, signed earlier this year by the two organizations, to develop bioinformatics software applications for drug discovery.
GeneFold combines sequence-based alignment with structural information to help researchers identify protein folds that a given sequence is most likely to fit, resulting in a method that the company claimed is more sensitive and selective for fold recognition than either method alone. When combined with Tripos's Composer to build a 3D model, GeneFold provides a unique tool for protein structure modeling, according to the company.
Trevor Heritage, Tripos's vice-president of discovery software research and development, commented, "The real power of GeneFold is the ability to build structural models for proteins that show very little sequence similarity to known protein structures." He said the technology is remarkable "because it allows us to construct a receptor-based pharmacophore from a modeled structure that is well within the structural deviation typically found in experimentally determined structures."