Rational Drug Design
One of the earliest medical applica-
tions of bioinformatics has been in
aiding rational drug design. Figure 2
outlines the commonly cited approach,
taking the MLH1 gene product as an
example drug target. MLH1 is a human
gene encoding a mismatch repair
protein (mmr) situated on the short
arm of chromosome 3
[
125
]
. Through
linkage analysis and its similarity to
mmr genes in mice, the gene has
been implicated in nonpolyposis colo-
rectal cancer
[
126
]
. Given the nucle-
o
tide sequence, the probable amino
acid sequence of the encoded protein