Transporter-protein structures show how salt gets a sweet ride into cells

Nature ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Drew
2019 ◽  
Vol 476 (24) ◽  
pp. 3835-3847 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aliyath Susmitha ◽  
Kesavan Madhavan Nampoothiri ◽  
Harsha Bajaj

Most Gram-positive bacteria contain a membrane-bound transpeptidase known as sortase which covalently incorporates the surface proteins on to the cell wall. The sortase-displayed protein structures are involved in cell attachment, nutrient uptake and aerial hyphae formation. Among the six classes of sortase (A–F), sortase A of S. aureus is the well-characterized housekeeping enzyme considered as an ideal drug target and a valuable biochemical reagent for protein engineering. Similar to SrtA, class E sortase in GC rich bacteria plays a housekeeping role which is not studied extensively. However, C. glutamicum ATCC 13032, an industrially important organism known for amino acid production, carries a single putative sortase (NCgl2838) gene but neither in vitro peptide cleavage activity nor biochemical characterizations have been investigated. Here, we identified that the gene is having a sortase activity and analyzed its structural similarity with Cd-SrtF. The purified enzyme showed a greater affinity toward LAXTG substrate with a calculated KM of 12 ± 1 µM, one of the highest affinities reported for this class of enzyme. Moreover, site-directed mutation studies were carried to ascertain the structure functional relationship of Cg-SrtE and all these are new findings which will enable us to perceive exciting protein engineering applications with this class of enzyme from a non-pathogenic microbe.


1970 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-226
Author(s):  
S. M. Minhaz Ud-Dean ◽  
Mahdi Muhammad Moosa

Protein structure prediction and evaluation is one of the major fields of computational biology. Estimation of dihedral angle can provide information about the acceptability of both theoretically predicted and experimentally determined structures. Here we report on the sequence specific dihedral angle distribution of high resolution protein structures available in PDB and have developed Sasichandran, a tool for sequence specific dihedral angle prediction and structure evaluation. This tool will allow evaluation of a protein structure in pdb format from the sequence specific distribution of Ramachandran angles. Additionally, it will allow retrieval of the most probable Ramachandran angles for a given sequence along with the sequence specific data. Key words: Torsion angle, φ-ψ distribution, sequence specific ramachandran plot, Ramasekharan, protein structure appraisal D.O.I. 10.3329/ptcb.v19i2.5439 Plant Tissue Cult. & Biotech. 19(2): 217-226, 2009 (December)


Diabetes ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 441-446 ◽  
Author(s):  
Y. Oka ◽  
T. Asano ◽  
Y. Shibasaki ◽  
J. L. Lin ◽  
K. Tsukuda ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maximilian Kuhn ◽  
Stuart Firth-Clark ◽  
Paolo Tosco ◽  
Antonia S. J. S. Mey ◽  
Mark Mackey ◽  
...  

Free energy calculations have seen increased usage in structure-based drug design. Despite the rising interest, automation of the complex calculations and subsequent analysis of their results are still hampered by the restricted choice of available tools. In this work, an application for automated setup and processing of free energy calculations is presented. Several sanity checks for assessing the reliability of the calculations were implemented, constituting a distinct advantage over existing open-source tools. The underlying workflow is built on top of the software Sire, SOMD, BioSimSpace and OpenMM and uses the AMBER14SB and GAFF2.1 force fields. It was validated on two datasets originally composed by Schrödinger, consisting of 14 protein structures and 220 ligands. Predicted binding affinities were in good agreement with experimental values. For the larger dataset the average correlation coefficient Rp was 0.70 ± 0.05 and average Kendall’s τ was 0.53 ± 0.05 which is broadly comparable to or better than previously reported results using other methods. <br>


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan J. R. Ferrari ◽  
Fabio C. Gozzo ◽  
Leandro Martinez

<div><p>Chemical cross-linking/Mass Spectrometry (XLMS) is an experimental method to obtain distance constraints between amino acid residues, which can be applied to structural modeling of tertiary and quaternary biomolecular structures. These constraints provide, in principle, only upper limits to the distance between amino acid residues along the surface of the biomolecule. In practice, attempts to use of XLMS constraints for tertiary protein structure determination have not been widely successful. This indicates the need of specifically designed strategies for the representation of these constraints within modeling algorithms. Here, a force-field designed to represent XLMS-derived constraints is proposed. The potential energy functions are obtained by computing, in the database of known protein structures, the probability of satisfaction of a topological cross-linking distance as a function of the Euclidean distance between amino acid residues. The force-field can be easily incorporated into current modeling methods and software. In this work, the force-field was implemented within the Rosetta ab initio relax protocol. We show a significant improvement in the quality of the models obtained relative to current strategies for constraint representation. This force-field contributes to the long-desired goal of obtaining the tertiary structures of proteins using XLMS data. Force-field parameters and usage instructions are freely available at http://m3g.iqm.unicamp.br/topolink/xlff <br></p></div><p></p><p></p>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lim Heo ◽  
Collin Arbour ◽  
Michael Feig

Protein structures provide valuable information for understanding biological processes. Protein structures can be determined by experimental methods such as X-ray crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, or cryogenic electron microscopy. As an alternative, in silico methods can be used to predict protein structures. Those methods utilize protein structure databases for structure prediction via template-based modeling or for training machine-learning models to generate predictions. Structure prediction for proteins distant from proteins with known structures often results in lower accuracy with respect to the true physiological structures. Physics-based protein model refinement methods can be applied to improve model accuracy in the predicted models. Refinement methods rely on conformational sampling around the predicted structures, and if structures closer to the native states are sampled, improvements in the model quality become possible. Molecular dynamics simulations have been especially successful for improving model qualities but although consistent refinement can be achieved, the improvements in model qualities are still moderate. To extend the refinement performance of a simulation-based protocol, we explored new schemes that focus on an optimized use of biasing functions and the application of increased simulation temperatures. In addition, we tested the use of alternative initial models so that the simulations can explore conformational space more broadly. Based on the insight of this analysis we are proposing a new refinement protocol that significantly outperformed previous state-of-the-art molecular dynamics simulation-based protocols in the benchmark tests described here. <br>


2015 ◽  
pp. 125-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. V. Goncharenko

In this article we proposed a new method of non-hierarchical cluster analysis using k-nearest-neighbor graph and discussed it with respect to vegetation classification. The method of k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) classification was originally developed in 1951 (Fix, Hodges, 1951). Later a term “k-NN graph” and a few algorithms of k-NN clustering appeared (Cover, Hart, 1967; Brito et al., 1997). In biology k-NN is used in analysis of protein structures and genome sequences. Most of k-NN clustering algorithms build «excessive» graph firstly, so called hypergraph, and then truncate it to subgraphs, just partitioning and coarsening hypergraph. We developed other strategy, the “upward” clustering in forming (assembling consequentially) one cluster after the other. Until today graph-based cluster analysis has not been considered concerning classification of vegetation datasets.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document