Protein Design
The preceding discussion implicitly assumed that the rotamers are all different orientations of the same amino acid side chain. That is, the sequence of the protein was assumed to be fixed. It is also possible to allow multiple side chains to "compete" over a position by including both types of side chains in the set of rotamers for that position. This allows a novel sequence to be designed onto a given protein backbone. A short zinc finger protein fold has been redesigned this way. However, this greatly increases the number of rotamers per position and still requires a fixed protein length.
Read more about this topic: Dead-end Elimination
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