Computational approaches and resources in single amino acid substitutions analysis toward clinical research

Single amino acid substitutions (SAPs) belong to a class of SNPs in the coding region, which alter the protein function during the translation process. Storage of more information regarding SAPs in public databases will soon become a major hurdle in characterizing the functional SAPs. In such a demanding era, biology has to rely on bioinformatics, which can work its way through to solve the problems at hand by cutting huge amount of time and resources that are otherwise wasted. Here, we describe an overview of the existing repositories of variant databases and computational methods in predicting the effects of functional SAPs on protein stability, structure, function, drug response, and protein dynamics. This chapter will inspire many biologists with a greater promise in identifying the functional SAPs at the structural level, thereby understanding the molecular effects that are critical for personalized medicine diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment for diseases.