Posts by strauch

1) Message boards : Rosetta@home Science : Design of protein-protein interfaces (Message 65126) Posted 27 Jan 2010 by strauch Post: My name is Eva-Maria Strauch and I am one of the post-docs in the Baker lab working on the design of protein-protein interactions. I am very excited about having the possibility to run on R@H, thanks to your generous contributions! Protein design requires a lot of sampling since there are so many many different possibilities to be considered carefully. This will work out now faster with your help! I am currently designing proteins to bind to a model system which we use to calibrate our computational protocols. This particular target is the back end of a human immune-system antibody (Fc fragment, which is what you will see under the work unit descriptions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fc_region). The cool thing about Fc is that nature provides us with several proteins that bind to it, hence it taught us very important lessons on how to design possible binding proteins to it. We now want to see whether we've figured this one out and can mimic nature's ability to come up with binders towards this target. Success will further contribute to the optimization of our protocols to generate several protein-based inhibitors to attack cancer and infectious diseases. Questions we want to answere with this design project are: How well do we perform in comparison with nature? and if we understood all the information we got out of those native interactions, are we able to produce several de novo binding proteins that mimic the atomic interactions seen with native interaction Fc has with different proteins? This project will contribute to our understanding of how proteins recognize one another. Promising designs will be experimentally verified and also further characterized to see how well we performed, and what was possibly missing that we should include into our computational design protocol. Thanks again for your contribution!