

Hi, Heremy,
Many people have given you very usefull suggestions in responsing your 
questions about how to predict a mutant structure and the property 
changed after mutation. They provided some software such as Whatif, 
Quanta/Charmm, Sybyl, and Insight II. However, if you want to gain some
general concept about the mutant structure prediction methods, I would like
to suggest you to read a paper by Prof. Chris Sander, which was published
in Protein Engineering, Vol.7, No. 10, pp.1203~1208. In addition, simple
point mutation, especially the mutation such as from a charged residue to
a uncharged residue will bring some change to the protein, and 
many people are working on such property change prediction, in 
fact, some methods have been developed to predict the 
quality change, even though it seems a little difficult comparing 
to the development of structure prediction methods, typically, some
methods on electrostatic calculation have been developed, such as those
by Prof. Barry Honig in Columbia University, and Dr. Donald in Scrippt
Institute, also the software DELPHI to study the electrostatic property
has been included in Insight II (Biosym Inc. software). I am sure once
more experiments on mutation have been carried out, people will get more
rules, all these will promote the methods for property prediction.

Yanli Wang,
Peking University, Beijing
e-mail: [email-masked]

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