Published in Proteins
Clostridium thermocellum is actively being developed as a microbial platform to produce biofuels and chemicals from renewable plant biomass. An attractive feature of this bacterium is its ability to efficiently degrade lignocellulose using surface-displayed cellulosomes, large multi-protein complexes that house different types of cellulase enzymes....
Published in Proteins
The heterologous overexpression states of prion proteins play a critical role in understanding the mechanisms of prion-related diseases. We report herein the identification of soluble monomer and complex states for a bakers' yeast prion, Sup35, when expressed in Escherichia coli. Two peaks are apparent with the elution of His-tagged Sup35 by imidaz...
Published in Proteins
Cell division control protein 42 homolog (Cdc42), which contributes to multiple cellular processes including cell proliferation and migration, is a potential target for cancer therapy, especially in the intervention of tumor migration. Cdc42's mutants G12V and Q61L are discovered constitutively active, and the overexpression of them exhibits oncoge...
Published in Proteins
Petroleum-based plastics are durable and accumulate in all ecological niches. Knowledge on enzymatic degradation is sparse. Today, less than 50 verified plastics-active enzymes are known. First examples of enzymes acting on the polymers polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polyurethane (PUR) have been reported together with a detailed biochemical a...
Published in Proteins
Oligopeptide permease A (OppA) plays an important role in the nutrition of cells and various signaling processes. In archaea, OppA is a major protein present in membrane vesicles of Thermococcales. Because there being no crystal structures of archaeal OppAs determined to date, we report the crystal structure of archaeal OppA from Thermococcus kodak...
Published in Proteins
Protein engineering and enzyme immobilization strategies have produced numerous biocatalysts for modern industrial applications. In this study, we have also used these two strategies for improving the operational stability and catalytic efficiency of serine protease from Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The enzyme serine protease was truncated to separate i...
Published in Proteins
According to the "jigsaw puzzle" model of protein folding, the isomorphism between sequence and structure is substantially determined by the specific geometry of side-chain interactions, within the protein interior. In this work, we have attempted to predict the hydrophobic core of cyclophilin (LdCyp) from Leishmania donovani, utilizing a surface c...
Published in Proteins
Multimeric protein complexes are molecular apparatuses to regulate biological systems and often determine their fate. Among proteins forming such molecular assemblies, amyloid proteins have drawn attention over a half-century since amyloid fibril formation of these proteins is supposed to be a common pathogenic cause for neurodegenerative diseases....
Published in Proteins
When two or more amino acid mutations occur in protein systems, they can interact in a nonadditive fashion termed epistasis. One way to quantify epistasis between mutation pairs in protein systems is by using free energy differences: ϵ = ΔΔG1,2 - (ΔΔG1 + ΔΔG2 ) where ΔΔG refers to the change in the Gibbs free energy, subscripts 1 and 2 refer to sin...
Published in Proteins
Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) exploits the sequence variation and structural dynamics of the envelope glycoprotein gp120 to evade the immune attack of neutralization antibodies, contributing to various HIV neutralization phenotypes. Although the HIV neutralization phenotype has been experimentally characterized, the roles of rapid sequence var...
