I am currently doing my research on Chemokines through computational approaches at National Centre for Biological Science (NCBS) , Bangalore, India.
                
           Interleukin-8 like chemokines is a large superfamily, including small chemotactic cytokines (~8-12 kDa) which are called chemokines / intercrines. They are mostly basic and structurally related molecules. Chemokines are characterized by shared structural determinants including conserved cysteine residues that form disulfide bonds in the chemokine tertiary structure. The chemokines were initially subdivided into two branches that are characterized by the motif patterns involving two N-terminal cysteine residues: CXC and CC, subfamilies. These prototypical chemokines map to human chromosomes 4 (CXC subfamily) and 17 (CC subfamily). Although most of the chemokines belong to one of these two classes, two additional branches, CX₃C and XC, each containing a single member have been described in recent years. This C and CX₃C genes map to human chromosome 1 and 16 respectively. The CX₃C chemokine has a characteristic motif of three residues in between the N-terminal two cysteines. XC chemokine, which is identified as lymphotactin, lacks both the first and third cysteine in the “4 cysteine motif” but shares homology at its carboxyl end with the CC chemokines.