Publications associées à mu ABC: a systematic microsecond molecular dynamics study of tetranucleotide sequence effects in B-DNA

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

Towards improving full-length ribosome density prediction by bridging sequence and graph-based representations

Felix Naef, Pierre Vandergheynst, Cédric Gobet, Mohan Vamsi Nallapareddy, Francesco Craighero

Translation elongation plays an important role in regulating protein concentrations in the cell, and dysregulation of this process has been linked to several human diseases. In this study, we use data from ribo-seq experiments to model ribosome densities, ...

PMLR2024

Oxidative Defect Detection Within Free and Packed DNA Systems: A Quantum Mechanical/Molecular Mechanics (QM/ MM) Approach

Ursula Röthlisberger

Base excision repair enzymes (BERs) detect and repair oxidative DNA damage with efficacy despite the small size of the defects and their often only minor structural impact. A charge transfer (CT) model for rapid scanning of DNA stretches has been evoked to ...

Swiss Chemical Soc2024

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

Mahdi Hijazi

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

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

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

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

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

Development of multiplexed single-molecule imaging techniques to study chromatin invasion dynamics of chromatin effector proteins

Kristina Makasheva

DNA-binding proteins physically interact with the DNA and directly affect genomic functions. The eukaryotic genome is compacted into chromatin, limiting the DNA access to nuclear factors. In this Ph.D. thesis, I explored the dynamic mechanisms, that allow ...

EPFL2023

Computational design of dynamic receptor—peptide signaling complexes applied to chemotaxis

Andreas Füglistaler, Aurélien Laurent Jean-Charles Oggier, Mahdi Hijazi, Patrick Daniel Barth, Robert Everett Jefferson, Ana Paola Rico Villarreal

Engineering protein biosensors that sensitively respond to specific biomolecules by triggering precise cellular responses is a major goal of diagnostics and synthetic cell biology. Previous biosensor designs have largely relied on binding structurally well ...

Nature Research2023

Achieving high hybridization density at DNA biosensor surfaces using branched spacer and click chemistry

Mounir Driss Mensi, Sandrine Gerber, Lucas Mayoraz, Perrine Agnes Edith Robin, Alireza Kavand

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the necessity to develop fast, highly sensitive and selective virus detection methods. Surface-based DNA-biosensors are interesting candidates for this purpose. Functionalization of solid substrates with DNA must be pr ...

2023

Scaling Description of Dynamical Heterogeneity and Avalanches of Relaxation in Glass-Forming Liquids

Ali Tahaei, Matthieu Wyart

We provide a theoretical description of dynamical heterogeneities in glass-forming liquids, based on the premise that relaxation occurs via local rearrangements coupled by elasticity. In our framework, the growth of the dynamical correlation length e and o ...

American Physical Society2023

Fast viral dynamics revealed by microsecond time-resolved cryo-EM

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Oliver Florian Harder, Sarah Victoria Barrass

Observing proteins as they perform their tasks has largely remained elusive, which has left our understanding of protein function fundamentally incom- plete. To enable such observations, we have recently proposed a technique that improves the time resoluti ...

Nature Research2023

Secondary structure of the human mitochondrial genome affects formation of deletions

Jacques Fellay, Konstantin Popadin

BackgroundAging in postmitotic tissues is associated with clonal expansion of somatic mitochondrial deletions, the origin of which is not well understood. Such deletions are often flanked by direct nucleotide repeats, but this alone does not fully explain ...

BMC2023

Recycling of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) Kits

Francesco Stellacci, Yong Zhu, Weina Liu

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) kits have been used as common diagnosing tools during the outbreak of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic, with daily worldwide usage in the millions. It is well known that at the beginn ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2023

Bridging Native and Intrinsic Structures of Microhydrated Biomolecules by Cold Ion Spectroscopy

Andrei Zviagin

Solving native structures of such large molecules, like biomolecules, is often challenging, particularly due to the potentially infinite number of non-covalent interactions with water. In this thesis, we report the use of cold ion gas-phase action spectros ...

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

Telomere protection against oxidative stress

Thu Trang Nguyen

Telomeres are nucleoprotein structures at the ends of linear chromosomes, being essential for the maintenance of genomic integrity. Telomeres have a unique structure which distinguishes chromosome termini from DNA damage sites. Shelterin complexes are the ...

EPFL2023

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

Deep learning approaches for conformational flexibility and switching properties in protein design

Mahdi Hijazi, Patrick Daniel Barth, Lucas Sebastian Powell-Rudden

Following the hugely successful application of deep learning methods to protein structure prediction, an increasing number of design methods seek to leverage generative models to design proteins with improved functionality over native proteins or novel str ...

2022