The Importance of Establishing Protein Sequence Homologies

*  it is a major step towards determining the likely 3D structure, and function, of an amino acid sequence.

* In practice, primary structure is in fact more easily determined by interpreting a gene sequence of nucleotides than directly from a purified protein itself.

- The recent advances in recombinant DNA technology have led to an explosion in the number of gene sequences from many organisms. Analysis of these sequences to determine if any are homologous to sequences of known structure allows prediction of possible structure/functions.