Publications related to Structure and Biophysical Properties of a Triple-Stranded Beta-Helix Comprising the Central Spike of Bacteriophage T4

Investigating the intra-molecular and inter-molecular effects of post-translational modifications on intrinsically disordered protein regions and structured protein regions

Post-translational modifications (PTMs) play a pivotal role in regulating protein structure, interaction, and function. Aberrant PTM patterns are associated with diseases. Moreover, individual PTMs have a complex interaction with each other, known as PTM c ...

EPFL2024

A Versatile Approach to Stabilize Liquid-Liquid Interfaces using Surfactant Self-Assembly

Julian Charles Shillcock

Stabilizing liquid-liquid interfaces, whether between miscible or immiscible liquids, is crucial for a wide range of applications, including energy storage, microreactors, and biomimetic structures. In this study, a versatile approach for stabilizing the w ...

Wiley-V C H Verlag Gmbh2024

Opportunities and challenges in design and optimization of protein function

Bruno Emanuel Ferreira De Sousa Correia, Casper Alexander Goverde

The field of protein design has made remarkable progress over the past decade. Historically, the low reliability of purely structure-based design methods limited their application, but recent strategies that combine structure-based and sequence-based calcu ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Long live(d) CsPbBr3 superlattices: colloidal atomic layer deposition for structural stability

Raffaella Buonsanti, Alexander Nicolas Chen, Philippe Benjamin Green, Victoria Lapointe

Superlattice formation afforded by metal halide perovskite nanocrystals has been a phenomenon of interest due to the high structural order induced in these self-assemblies, an order that is influenced by the surface chemistry and particle morphology of the ...

Royal Soc Chemistry2024

Colloidal Atomic Layer Deposition on Nanocrystals Using Ligand-Modified Precursors

Raffaella Buonsanti, Anna Loiudice, Petru Pasquale Albertini, Ona Segura Lecina, Coline Marie Agathe Boulanger, Philippe Benjamin Green, Mark Adrian Newton, Krishna Kumar, Jari Leemans

Atomic layer deposition (ALD) is a method to grow thin metal oxide layers on a variety of materials for applications spanning from electronics to catalysis. Extending ALD to colloidally stable nanocrystals promises to combine the benefits of thin metal oxi ...

Amer Chemical Soc2024

Secondary Structures of MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2 Spike Proteins Revealed by Infrared Vibrational Spectroscopy

Marta Di Fabrizio

All coronaviruses are characterized by spike glycoproteins whose S1 subunits contain the receptor binding domain (RBD). The RBD anchors the virus to the host cellular membrane to regulate the virus transmissibility and infectious process. Although the prot ...

MDPI2023

cgNA+: A sequence-dependent coarse-grain model of double-stranded nucleic acids

Rahul Sharma

DNA mechanics plays a crucial role in many biological processes, including nucleosome positioning and protein-DNA interactions. It is believed that nature employs epigenetic modifications in DNA to further regulate gene expression. Moreover, double-strande ...

EPFL2023

Design of an artificial phage-display library based on a new scaffold improved for average stability of the randomized proteins

Ghérici Hassaïne

Scaffold-based protein libraries are designed to be both diverse and rich in functional/folded proteins. However, introducing an extended diversity while preserving stability of the initial scaffold remains a challenge. Here we developed an original approa ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Landscapes of DNA Mechanics and Genomes

Thomas Antonin Zwahlen

The local physical properties - such as shape and flexibility - of the DNA double-helix is today widely believed to be influenced by nucleic acid sequence in a non-trivial way. Furthermore, there is strong evidence that these properties play a role in many ...

EPFL2023

De novo protein design by inversion of the AlphaFold structure prediction network

Bruno Emanuel Ferreira De Sousa Correia, Stéphane Rosset, Casper Alexander Goverde, Benedict Dieter Gregor Wolf, Hamed Khakzad

De novo protein design enhances our understanding of the principles that govern protein folding and interactions, and has the potential to revolutionize biotechnology through the engineering of novel protein functionalities. Despite recent progress in comp ...

2023

cgNA plus web : A Visual Interface to the cgNA plus Sequence-dependent Statistical Mechanics Model of Double-stranded Nucleic Acids

John Maddocks, Alessandro Samuele Patelli, Lennart de Bruin, Rahul Sharma

The sequence-dependent statistical mechanics of double-stranded nucleic acid, or dsNA, is believed to be essential in its biological functions. In turn, the equilibrium statistical mechanics behaviour of dsNA depends strongly both on sequence-dependent per ...

Elsevier2023

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

Assessment of transferable forcefields for protein simulations attests improved description of disordered states and secondary structure propensities, and hints at multi-protein systems as the next challenge for optimization

Matteo Dal Peraro, Luciano Andres Abriata

Continuous assessment of transferable forcefields for molecular simulations is essential to identify their weaknesses and direct improvement efforts. The latest efforts focused on better describing disordered proteins while retaining proper description of ...

2021

Structure-Property Relationships in Complex Materials by Combining Supervised and Unsupervised Machine Learning

Benjamin Aaron Helfrecht

The work presented in this thesis combines supervised and unsupervised machine learning to examine structure-property relationships in databases of materials. While either supervised learning or unsupervised learning alone can be a powerful tool for assess ...

EPFL2021

Sequence-dependent structural properties of B-DNA: what have we learned in 40 years?

John Maddocks, Daiva Petkeviciute, Paolo Carloni, Marco Pasi, Rahul Sharma

The structure of B-DNA, the physiological form of the DNA molecule, has been a central topic in biology, chemistry and physics. Far from uniform and rigid, the double helix was revealed as a flexible and structurally polymorphic molecule. Conformational ch ...

Springernature2021

SPServer: split-statistical potentials for the analysis of protein structures and protein-protein interactions

Jaume Bonet Martinez

BackgroundStatistical potentials, also named knowledge-based potentials, are scoring functions derived from empirical data that can be used to evaluate the quality of protein folds and protein-protein interaction (PPI) structures. In previous works we deco ...

2021

On the use of direct-coupling analysis with a reduced alphabet of amino acids combined with super-secondary structure motifs for protein fold prediction

Jaume Bonet Martinez

Direct-coupling analysis (DCA) for studying the coevolution of residues in proteins has been widely used to predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its sequence. We present RADI/raDIMod, a variation of the original DCA algorithm that grou ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS2021

The Nt17 Domain and its Helical Conformation Regulate the Aggregation, Cellular Properties and Neurotoxicity of Mutant Huntingtin Exon 1

Giovanni Dietler, Hilal Lashuel, Anass Chiki, Francesco Simone Ruggeri, Anne-Laure Mahul Mellier, Sophie Vieweg, Sean Michael Deguire, Urszula Beata Cendrowska, Nathan Alain Denis Riguet

Converging evidence points to the N-terminal domain comprising the first 17 amino acids of the Huntingtin protein (Nt17) as a key regulator of its aggregation, cellular properties and toxicity. In this study, we further investigated the interplay between N ...

Elsevier2021

Investigating Crosstalk Among PTMs Provides Novel Insight Into the Structural Basis Underlying the Differential Effects of Nt17 PTMs on Mutant Httex1 Aggregation

Hilal Lashuel, Anass Chiki, Matteo Dal Peraro, Luciano Andres Abriata, Lucien Fabrice Krapp, Driss Boudeffa, Rajasekhar Kolla, Zhidian Zhang, Iman Rostami

Post-translational modifications (PTMs) within the first 17 amino acids (Nt17) of the Huntingtin protein (Htt) have been shown to inhibit the aggregation and attenuate the toxicity of mutant Htt proteins in vitro and in various models of Huntington’s disea ...

2021

Revisiting Cation Complexation and Hydrogen Bonding of Single-Chain Polyguluronate Alginate

Modifying the properties of bio-based materials has garnered increasing interest in recent years. In related applications, the ability of alginates to complex with metal ions has been shown to be effective in liquid-to-gel transitions, useful in the develo ...

American Chemical Society2021