A Study on the Three Dimensional Structure of Soybean Bowman-Birk Protease Isoinhibitor-DII Using Computer Aided Molecular Modeling

Computer aided molecular modeling can help to predict the three dimensional structure of the polypeptide without the sample. The study on soybean Bowman-Birk protease inhibitor (SBI) is valuable, because it has been recently known that SBI possesses anticarcinogenic activities and immune-stimulating properties. SBI has several isoinhibitors, whose isolation and characterization were reported in 1990. Among these, DII inhibits trypsin only. The different inhibitory specificities cannot be explained only by their different primary sequences, but is possible with further assistance by the study on their different three dimensional structures. The study on the three dimensional structure of DII using homology method is reported in this paper.