Unveiling the function of a novel protein is a challenging task that requires careful experimental design. Yeast cytokinesis is a conserved process that involves modular structural and regulatory proteins. For such proteins, an important step is to identify their domains and structural organization. Here we briefly discuss a collection of methods commonly used for sequence alignment and prediction of protein structure that represent powerful tools for the identification homologous domains and design of structure-function approaches to test experimentally the function of multi-domain proteins such as those implicated in yeast cytokinesis.
Keywords: Anillin; Cell division; Cytokinesis; Sad kinase; Structure-function analysis.