Concept

Denaturation (biochemistry)

Related publications (29)

Development of tools and methods for protein identification: From single molecules to in vivo applications

As the fundamental machinery orchestrating cellular functions, proteins influence the state of every cell profoundly. As cells exhibit significant variations from one to another, analyzing the proteome on a single-cell level is imperative to unravel their ...

EPFL2024

Cgas super-enzymes for cancer immunotherapy

Andrea Ablasser, Natasha Ella Samson, Alexander Scott Keller

The present invention relates to anti-tumor lymphocytes, and a variant cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS) carrying an amino acid substitution of one or both arginines at amino acid positions 255 and 236 and/or an amino acid substitution of one or both lysines ...

2023

A fluorescent multi-domain protein reveals the unfolding mechanism of Hsp70

Paolo De Los Rios, Bruno Claude Daniel Fauvet, Salvatore Assenza, Satyam Tiwari

Detailed understanding of the mechanism by which Hsp70 chaperones protect cells against protein aggregation is hampered by the lack of a comprehensive characterization of the aggregates, which are typically heterogeneous. Here we designed a reporter chaper ...

Nature Research2023

Molten globule-like transition state of protein barnase measured with calorimetric force spectroscopy

Sebastian James Davis

Understanding how proteins fold into their native structure is a fundamental problem in biophysics, crucial for protein design. It has been hypothesized that the formation of a molten globule intermediate precedes folding to the native conformation of glob ...

National Academy of Sciences2022

Extracting phylogenetic dimensions of coevolution reveals hidden functional signals

Anne-Florence Raphaëlle Bitbol

Despite the structural and functional information contained in the statistical coupling between pairs of residues in a protein, coevolution associated with function is often obscured by artifactual signals such as genetic drift, which shapes a protein's ph ...

Nature Portfolio2022

Amplitude and phase reconstruction for Low-Energy Electron Holography of individual proteins

Hannah Julia Ochner

Single-molecule imaging methods are of importance in structural biology, and specifically in the imaging of proteins, since they can elucidate conformational variability and structural changes that might be lost in imaging methods relying on averaging proc ...

EPFL2022

Competing Effects of Hydration and Cation Complexation in Single-Chain Alginate

Zezhong Li

Alginic acid, a naturally occurring anionic polyelectrolyte, forms strong physically cross-linked hydrogels in the presence of metal cations. The latter engage in electrostatic interactions that compete with intra- and intermolecular hydrogen bonds, determ ...

American Chemical Society2022

Towards automating de novo protein design for novel functionalities: controlling protein folds and protein-protein interactions

Zander Harteveld

The sheer size of the protein sequence space is massive: a protein of 100 residues can have 20^100 possible sequence combinations; and knowing that this exceeds the number of atoms in the universe, the chance of randomly discovering a stable new sequence w ...

EPFL2022

Reviewing Challenges of Predicting Protein Melting Temperature Change Upon Mutation Through the Full Analysis of a Highly Detailed Dataset with High-Resolution Structures

Luciano Andres Abriata

Predicting the effects of mutations on protein stability is a key problem in fundamental and applied biology, still unsolved even for the relatively simple case of small, soluble, globular, monomeric, two-state-folder proteins. Many articles discuss the li ...

2021

Statistical physics of interacting proteins: Impact of dataset size and quality assessed in synthetic sequences

Anne-Florence Raphaëlle Bitbol, Pierre Mergny

Identifying protein-protein interactions is crucial for a systems-level understanding of the cell. Recently, algorithms based on inverse statistical physics, e.g., direct coupling analysis (DCA), have allowed to use evolutionarily related sequences to addr ...

2020

Thioredoxin-Related Transmembrane Proteins: TMX1 and Little Brothers TMX2, TMX3, TMX4 and TMX5

Maurizio Molinari

The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) is site of synthesis and maturation of membrane and secretory proteins in eukaryotic cells. The ER contains more than 20 members of the Protein Disulfide Isomerase (PDI) family. These enzymes regulate formation, isomerization ...

2020

The cold denaturation of IscU highlights structure–function dualism in marginally stable proteins

Paolo De Los Rios

Proteins undergo both cold and heat denaturation, but often cold denaturation cannot be detected because it occurs at temperatures below water freezing. Proteins undergoing detectable cold as well as heat denaturation yield a reliable curve of protein stab ...

2018

Dual-controlled optogenetic system for the rapid down-regulation of protein levels in mammalian cells

Patrick Andreas Gonschorek

Optogenetic switches are emerging molecular tools for studying cellular processes as they offer higher spatiotemporal and quantitative precision than classical, chemical-based switches. Light-controllable gene expression systems designed to upregulate prot ...

Nature Research2018

Three branches to rule them all? UPR signalling in response to chemically versus misfolded proteins-induced ER stress

Maurizio Molinari

Study of the unfolded protein responses (UPR) is mainly addressed by challenging eukaryotic cells with chemical compounds that impair calcium, redox or glycan homeostasis. These dramatically alter the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) environment and function, bu ...

2018

Non equilibrium thermodynamics of protein organization

Alberto Stefano Sassi

Three quarters of the thesis will be devoted to the discussion of non equilibrium systems. We show how certain biological systems cannot be described by standard thermodynamics. The reason is that the energy consumption due to the hydrolysis of ATP imposes ...

EPFL2018

Fabrication and Characterization of Biodegradable, Thermal-Responsive Silk Composite Membrane

Jürgen Brugger, Xiao Sheng Zhang, Ya Wang

In this work, we present a study on a thermalresponsive biodegradable membrane composed of silk fibroin and iron oxide nanoparticles as potential candidate material for implantable smart drug delivery microsystems. Ethanol annealing increased the content o ...

2018

Cytosolic Proteostasis Networks of the Mitochondrial Stress Response

Johan Auwerx, Vincenzo Sorrentino, Davide D'Amico

Mitochondrial stress requires timely intervention to prevent mitochondria' and cellular dysfunction. Re-establishing the correct protein homeostasis is crucial for coping with mitochondria' stress and maintaining cellular homeostasis. The best-characterize ...

Elsevier Science London2017

Novel systems biology approaches for design and analysis of palmitoylation networks reveal its regulatory effects on protein stability, activity and localization

Tiziano Dallavilla

Communication and environment sensing are fundamental for the regulation of the majority of the cellular functions. In cells there are dedicated networks that are responsible for signalling, which gives the ability to the cell of sensing the external and i ...

EPFL2017

Nanomechanics of multidomain neuronal cell adhesion protein contactin revealed by single molecule AFM and SMD

Giovanni Dietler, Andrzej Kulik

Contactin-4 (CNTN4) is a complex cell adhesion molecule (CAM) localized at neuronal membranes, playing a key role in maintaining the mechanical integrity and signaling properties of the synapse. CNTN4 consists of six immunoglobulin C2 type (IgC2) domains a ...

Springer Nature2017

Studying membrane-protein interplay by modeling realistic conditions

Martina Audagnotto

Realistic models of cellular environments have long captured the imagination of biologists and physical scientists. More than 20 years ago, Goodshellâ s inspiring rendering of cellular environments provided the foundation for the idea of capturing the ful ...

EPFL2017