Structural bioinformatics is the branch of
bioinformatics which is related to the analysis and prediction of the three-dimensional structure of biological
macromolecules such as
proteins,
RNA, and
DNA. It deals with generalizations about macromolecular 3D structure such as comparisons of overall folds and local motifs, principles of molecular folding, evolution, and binding interactions, and structure/function relationships, working both from experimentally solved structures and from computational models. The term
structural has the same meaning as in
structural biology, and structural bioinformatics can be seen as a part of computational structural biology.