Rosetta: Project News Oct 6, 2011

Journal post from David BakerA recent issue of Nature describes an exciting result from Rosetta@home in collaboration with the NMR spectroscopy laboratory of Lewis Kay in Toronto. Like almost all machines, proteins in order to carry out their functions have to move (change their conformation somewhat) but it has been extremely difficult to determine what these conformational changes are. Lewis Kay's group has developed new methods for getting experimental information on the higher energy very shortlived conformations proteins visit while carrying out their functions. This data is not sufficient to determine the structure of these "excited state" conformations using conventional methods. However, as the paper shows, we can use these experimental data to guide Rosetta and Rosetta@home structure calculations, and produce models of these states. We went one step further than this in the paper by using Rosetta design calculations to stabilize the excited state, and subsequent experiments confirmed the validity of the model. This combination of experimental NMR data, Rosetta structure calculations, and Rosetta design should be very powerful in understanding how proteins carry out their functions.

More...