Publications related to Biofunctional Scaffold Design for Soft Tissue Regeneration

From Sequence to Dynamics to Function: Computational Design of Allostery and Ligand Selectivity in G-Protein Coupled Receptors

The phenomenon of allostery, a general property in proteins that has been heralded as "the second secret of life" remains elusive to our understanding and even more challenging to incorporate into protein design. One example of allosteric proteins with gre ...

EPFL2024

Engineering novel protein interactions with therapeutic potential using deep learning-guided surface design

Anthony Marchand

Proteins are foundational biomolecules of life playing a crucial role in a myriad of biological processes. Their function often requires interplay with other biomolecules, including proteins themselves. Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are essential for ...

EPFL2024

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

Predicting protein interactions using geometric deep learning on protein surfaces

Freyr Sverrisson

In the domain of computational structural biology, predicting protein interactions based on molecular structure remains a pivotal challenge. This thesis delves into this challenge through a series of interconnected studies. The first chapter introduces th ...

EPFL2024

Synergetic Support of Cartilage Homeostasis via Coupled Thermal-Hydrostatic Pressure Stimuli

Yanheng Guo

Cartilage homeostasis, crucial for musculoskeletal function, is orchestrated by interconnected biophysical cues. In healthy cartilage, repetitive compressive loading not only elicits a range of mechanical stimuli but also induces a gradual transient temper ...

EPFL2024

Mechanisms and functions of protein S-acylation

Françoise Gisou van der Goot Grunberg, Laurence Gouzi Abrami, Francisco De Magalhães Sarmento R De Mesquita

Over the past two decades, protein S-acylation (often referred to as S-palmitoylation) has emerged as an important regulator of vital signalling pathways. S-Acylation is a reversible post-translational modification that involves the attachment of a fatty a ...

Nature Portfolio2024

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

Zhidian Zhang

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

Recording physiological history of cells with chemical labeling

Kai Johnsson, Julien Hiblot, Ling Hai

Recordings of the physiological history of cells provide insights into biological processes, yet obtaining such recordings is a challenge. To address this, we introduce a method to record transient cellular events for later analysis. We designed proteins t ...

American Association for the Advancement of Science2024

Antibody-peptide conjugates for targeted inhibition of cysteine proteases

Elisa Oricchio

We developed a rational approach to design peptide-based covalent inhibitors and coupled the inhibitors with antibodies for cell-specific delivery. We used this platform to generate antibody-peptide inhibitor conjugates (APICs) that target a family of prot ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Development of cysteine cathepsin inhibitors combined with cell type-specific delivery for the treatment of B-cell lymphoma and solid tumors

Aaron Simone Petruzzella

Cysteine cathepsins proteases are enzymes that play essential physiological roles, but their activity is also associated to different aspects of cancer progression and to the development of other diseases. Therefore, cysteine cathepsins are relevant and pr ...

EPFL2024

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

Salome Riccarda Püntener

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

Microsecond time-resolved cryo-electron microscopy

Ulrich Lorenz

Microsecond time-resolved cryo-electron microscopy has emerged as a novel approach for directly observing protein dynamics. By providing microsecond temporal and near-atomic spatial resolution, it has the potential to elucidate a wide range of dynamics tha ...

2024

Microsecond Time-Resolved Cryo-Electron Microscopy

Oliver Florian Harder

Recently, single-particle cryo-electron microscopy emerged as a technique capable of determining protein structures at near-atomic resolution and resolving protein dynamics with a temporal resolution ranging from second to milliseconds. This thesis describ ...

EPFL2024

De novo designed proteins: a study in engineering novel folds and functions

Alexandra Krina Van Hall-Beauvais

Proteins control nearly every facet of life on a molecular level. Proteins are formed from linear strings of amino acids, which fold into three-dimensional structures that can enact functions. Evolution has created highly efficient proteins in diverse fold ...

EPFL2023

Computer-implemented design of peptide:receptor signaling complexes for enhanced chemotaxis

Patrick Daniel Barth, Robert Everett Jefferson

The present invention relates to a computer-implemented method for engineering the interaction between a protein and a cognate peptide that are capable of forming a molecular complex, wherein the method comprises (a) preparing in silico a library of test p ...

2023

A new age in protein design empowered by deep learning

Bruno Emanuel Ferreira De Sousa Correia, Michael Bronstein, Casper Alexander Goverde, Ilia Igashov, Arne Schneuing, Hamed Khakzad

The rapid progress in the field of deep learning has had a significant impact on protein design. Deep learning methods have recently produced a breakthrough in protein structure prediction, leading to the availability of high-quality models for millions of ...

Cell Press2023

A Geometric Transformer for Structural Biology: Development and Applications of the Protein Structure Transformer

Lucien Fabrice Krapp

Proteins, the central building blocks of life, play pivotal roles in nearly every biological function. To do so, these macromolecular structures interact with their surrounding environment in complex ways, leading to diverse functional behaviors. The predi ...

EPFL2023

Generative power of a protein language model trained on multiple sequence alignments

Umberto Lupo, Anne-Florence Raphaëlle Bitbol, Damiano Sgarbossa

Computational models starting from large ensembles of evolutionarily related protein sequences capture a representation of protein families and learn constraints associated to protein structure and function. They thus open the possibility for generating no ...

eLIFE SCIENCES PUBL LTD2023

Rational Design of Chemically Controlled Antibodies and Protein Therapeutics

Sandrine Madeleine Suzanne Georgeon, Anthony Marchand, Bruno Emanuel Ferreira De Sousa Correia, Pablo Gainza Cirauqui, Li Tang, Sailan Shui, Stéphane Rosset, Lucia Bonati, Leo Scheller

Protein-based therapeutics, such as monoclonal antibodies and cytokines, are important therapies for various pathophysiological conditions such as oncology, autoimmune disorders, and viral infections. However, the wide application of such protein therapeut ...

2023

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