Cell membrane proteins give up their secrets
Rice University scientists have succeeded in analyzing transmembrane protein folding in the same way they study the proteins’ free-floating, globular cousins.
Rice theoretical biologist Peter Wolynes and his team at the university’s Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP) have applied his energy landscape theory to proteins that are hard to view because they live and work primarily inside cell membranes.
The method should increase the technique’s value to researchers who study proteins implicated in diseases and possibly in the creation of drugs to treat them, he said.
The study appeared this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Caption: Rice University researchers are using a custom computer-modeling program to predict how transmembrane proteins will fold from basic genomic data. Here, the experimentally determined native structure of the bacteriorhodopsin subdomain (left), a predicted structure using AWSEM membrane (center), and a comparative alignment of both structures (right: native in beige, predicted in blue) shows how well the predictive algorithm succeeded.
Credit: Bobby Kim/Rice University
via Tumblr http://ift.tt/1sYc2tS July 24, 2014 at 05:53PM
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