Introduction to structural bioinformatics.

Structural Bioinformatics is one of the hot spots of interdisciplinary sciences and obtained amazing advances in recent years. The first chapter over-views the concept of structural bioinformatics, and briefly describe the contents of this book. The interdisciplinary corporations make it difficult to further divide structural bioinformatics, so the chapters in this book are roughly separated according to the different fields of their applications. That is, fundamental developments in methods of structural bioinformatics, tertiary structure prediction and folding mechanism analysis, the binding mechanism and the interactions between biological macromolecules and ligands, structure-based functional analysis of biological macromolecules, as well as the applications in drug design.