Publications related to Aerolysin, a Powerful Protein Sensor for Fundamental Studies and Development of Upcoming Applications

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

Structural heterogeneity of the ion and lipid channel TMEM16F

Horst Vogel

Transmembrane protein 16 F (TMEM16F) is a Ca2+-activated homodimer which functions as an ion channel and a phospholipid scramblase. Despite the availability of several TMEM16F cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) structures, the mechanism of activation ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Augmenting large language models with chemistry tools

Philippe Schwaller, Oliver Tobias Schilter, Andres Camilo Marulanda Bran, Carlo Baldassari

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in tasks across domains but struggle with chemistry-related problems. These models also lack access to external knowledge sources, limiting their usefulness in scientific applications. We introduce ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Prolamins' 3D structure: A new insight into protein modeling using the language of numbers and shapes

Niloufar Sharif

This study combined protein modeling methods to generate the prolamins' fractions as precise as possible. Hence, gliadins, zeins, kafirins, hordeins, secalins, avenins and oryzins were generated based on their characteristics and disulfide mapping. Finding ...

Elsevier Sci Ltd2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Impact of phylogeny on structural contact inference from protein sequence data

Nicola Dietler, Umberto Lupo, Anne-Florence Raphaëlle Bitbol

Local and global inference methods have been developed to infer structural contacts from multiple sequence alignments of homologous proteins. They rely on correlations in amino acid usage at contacting sites. Because homologous proteins share a common ance ...

ROYAL SOC2023

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

Selectively permeable microcapsules

Chuen-Ru Li

Microcapsules are appealing containers for delivering active ingredients, such as drugs and cosmetics, or conducting chemical and biological reactions on a small scale. To control the timing and location of release of these encapsulants, the shells of micr ...

EPFL2023

Combining phylogeny and coevolution improves the inference of interaction partners among paralogous proteins

Anne-Florence Raphaëlle Bitbol

Author summaryWhen two protein families interact, their sequences feature statistical dependencies. First, interacting proteins tend to share a common evolutionary history. Second, maintaining structure and interactions through the course of evolution yiel ...

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE2023

Systems and methods for de novo design of protein interactions with learned surface fingerprints

Anthony Marchand, Zander Harteveld, Pablo Gainza Cirauqui, Freyr Sverrisson, Andreas Scheck, Sarah Wehrle, Alexandra Krina Van Hall-Beauvais, Michael Bronstein

The present application relates to a computer-implemented systems and methods for protein interaction design using surface fingerprints. The method comprises predicting at least one target interface site with high binding propensity, wherein, optionally, t ...

2023

A molecular device for the redox quality control of GroEL/ES substrates

Camille Véronique Bernadette Goemans

Hsp60 chaperonins and their Hsp10 cofactors assist protein folding in all living cells, constituting the paradigmatic example of molecular chaperones. Despite extensive investigations of their structure and mechanism, crucial questions regarding how these ...

2023