Publications related to Field-portable optofluidic plasmonic biosensor for wide-field and label-free monitoring of molecular interactions

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microfluidic device combining hydrodynamic and dielectrophoretic trapping for the controlled contact between single micro-sized objects and application to adhesion assays

Philippe Renaud, Arnaud Bertsch, Clémentine Sophie Sarah Lipp

The understanding of cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions via receptor and ligand binding relies on our ability to study the very first events of their contact. Of particular interest is the interaction between a T cell receptor and its cognate peptide-m ...

ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY2023

Protein target highlights in CASP15: Analysis of models by structure providers

Bruno Lemaitre, Luciano Andres Abriata, Kuan-Lin Wu, Samuel Rommelaere, Han Xiao

We present an in-depth analysis of selected CASP15 targets, focusing on their biological and functional significance. The authors of the structures identify and discuss key protein features and evaluate how effectively these aspects were captured in the su ...

WILEY2023

Modeling non-covalent interactions in condensed phase

Veronika Juraskova

The modeling of non-covalent interactions, solvation effects, and chemical reactions in complex molecular environment is a challenging task. Current state-of-the-art approaches often rely on static computations using implicit solvent models and harmonic ap ...

EPFL2022

Molecular analysis and therapeutic applications of human serum albumin-fatty acid interactions

Alessandro Angelini, Alessandro Zorzi, Sara Linciano

Human serum albumin (hSA) is the major carrier protein for fatty acids (FAs) in plasma. Its ability to bind multiple FA moieties with moderate to high affinity has inspired the use of FA conjugation as a safe and natural platform to generate long-lasting t ...

ELSEVIER2022

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

Structural and analytical identifications of biomolecules by cold ion spectroscopy of non-covalent complexes

Erik Saparbayev

Non-covalent interactions are ubiquitous in nature. The diversity and functionality of these interactions are employed by nature as a universal tool for building the molecular mechanism of life. Although weak, these interactions play a key role in both for ...

EPFL2021

Similarities and Differences among Protein Dynamics Studied by Variable Temperature Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Relaxation

François Freymond, David Lyndon Emsley, Jayasubba Reddy Yarava, Baptiste Busi, Andrea Bertarello

Understanding and describing the dynamics of proteins is one of the major challenges in biology. Here, we use multifield variable-temperature NMR longitudinal relaxation (R-1) measurements to determine the hierarchical activation energies of motions of fou ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2021

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

Modeling biochemical reaction networks in complex intracellular environments

Daniel Robert Weilandt

Whether one aims to design treatments for diseases such as cancer or diabetes, engineer cells to produce valuable biochemicals sustainably, or to grasp the behavior of living organisms, it is essential to understand how cells react to genetic, environmenta ...

EPFL2020

Enhancing the Signaling of GPCRs via Orthosteric Ions

Horst Vogel, Shuguang Yuan

G protein-coupled receptors play essential roles in cellular processes such as neuronal signaling, vision, olfaction, tasting, and metabolism. As GPCRs are the most important drug targets, understanding their interactions with ligands is of utmost importan ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2020

Probing the interaction of nanoparticles with small molecules in real time via quartz crystal microbalance monitoring

Nikolaos Nianias, Stefan Guldin, Ye Yang, Runzhang Qi

Despite extensive advances in the field of molecular recognition, the real-time monitoring of small molecule binding to nanoparticles (NP) remains a challenge. To this end, we report on a versatile approach, based on quartz crystal microbalance with dissip ...

2019

Label-free plasmonic biosensors for real-time live cell analysis

Xiaokang Li

For decades, the understanding of life has been focused on its most fundamental building blocks: molecules. Deciphering the dynamic activities of protein molecules in human cells is of vital significance for fundamental and clinical studies. The minuscule ...

EPFL2019

Deciphering interaction fingerprints from protein molecular surfaces using geometric deep learning

Bruno Emanuel Ferreira De Sousa Correia, Pablo Gainza Cirauqui, Freyr Sverrisson, Michael Bronstein

Predicting interactions between proteins and other biomolecules solely based on structure remains a challenge in biology. A high-level representation of protein structure, the molecular surface, displays patterns of chemical and geometric features that fin ...

2019

Mechanics of Allostery: Contrasting the Induced Fit and Population Shift Scenarios

Solange Marie Flatt, Matthieu Wyart, Stefano Zamuner, Riccardo Ravasio, Carolina Brito Carvalho dos Santos

In allosteric proteins, binding a ligand can affect function at a distant location, for example, by changing the binding affinity of a substrate at the active site. The induced fit and population shift models, which differ by the assumed number of stable c ...

CELL PRESS2019