Shrivastava I, Vishveshwara S, Cieplak M, Maritan A, Banavar J R
Molecular Biophysics Unit, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1995 Sep 26;92(20):9206-9. doi: 10.1073/pnas.92.20.9206.
Protein folding is a relatively fast process considering the astronomical number of conformations in which a protein could find itself. Within the framework of a lattice model, we show that one can design rapidly folding sequences by assigning the strongest attractive couplings to the contacts present in a target native state. Our protein design can be extended to situations with both attractive and repulsive contacts. Frustration is minimized by ensuring that all the native contacts are again strongly attractive. Strikingly, this ensures the inevitability of folding and accelerates the folding process by an order of magnitude. The evolutionary implications of our findings are discussed.
考虑到蛋白质可能处于的天文数字般的构象,蛋白质折叠是一个相对快速的过程。在晶格模型的框架内,我们表明,通过将最强的吸引耦合分配给目标天然状态中存在的接触,可以设计出快速折叠的序列。我们的蛋白质设计可以扩展到同时存在吸引和排斥接触的情况。通过确保所有天然接触再次具有强吸引力,使受挫最小化。引人注目的是,这确保了折叠的必然性,并将折叠过程加速了一个数量级。我们讨论了研究结果的进化意义。