Publications related to Optogenetic control of Neisseria meningitidis Cas9 genome editing using an engineered, light-switchable anti-CRISPR protein

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

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

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

Advancing Cell-Free Synthetic Biology: From sustained PURE protein synthesis to an isothermal one-pot DNA replication system

Laura Sophie Grasemann

One of the goals of synthetic biology is the development of an artificial cell. Building an artificial cell from scratch will provide a deeper understanding of fundamental mechanisms and models in biology and promises to contribute towards building novel p ...

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

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

HaloTag-Based Tools for Live-Cell Imaging and Elucidation of Organellar Redox Biology

Sarah Emmert

Redox homeostasis is a key factor in maintaining cellular function and health. The main determinant of the intracellular redox potential is ubiquitous glutathione (GSH) together with its oxidized dimer (GSSG). Importantly, both redox equilibrium and GSH ho ...

EPFL2024

Resolving bacterial cell biology: from replisome dynamics to cell wall synthesis

Chen Zhang

Bacteria are ubiquitous single cellular organisms. Compared to eukaryotic cells, bacteria have two unique characteristics: the membrane-less nucleoid and the cell wall built of peptidoglycan (PG). In most bacteria, a single circular chromosome is compacted ...

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

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

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

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

De novo design of protein interactions with learned surface fingerprints

Henning Paul-Julius Stahlberg, Didier Trono, Priscilla Turelli, Charlène Mireille Raymonde Raclot, Sandrine Madeleine Suzanne Georgeon, Beat Fierz, Aaron Simone Petruzzella, Anthony Marchand, Bruno Emanuel Ferreira De Sousa Correia, Elisa Oricchio, Zander Harteveld, Pablo Gainza Cirauqui, Freyr Sverrisson, Andreas Scheck, Sarah Wehrle, Stéphane Rosset, Alexandra Krina Van Hall-Beauvais, Alexandra Teslenko, Jane Marsden, Michael Bronstein, Casper Alexander Goverde, Stephen Michael Buckley, Dongchun Ni, Martin Pacesa

Physical interactions between proteins are essential for most biological processes governing life. However, the molecular determinants of such interactions have been challenging to understand, even as genomic, proteomic and structural data increase. This k ...

2023

Peptide-Hypervalent Iodine Reagent Chimeras: Enabling Peptide Functionalization and Macrocyclization

Christian Heinis, Jérôme Waser, Xinjian Ji, Xingyu Liu

Herein, we report a novel strategy for the modification of peptides based on the introduction of highly reactive hypervalent iodine reagents-ethynylbenziodoxolones (EBXs)-onto peptides. These peptide-EBXs can be readily accessed, by both solution- and soli ...

Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH2023

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

Screening for drivers of SARS-CoV-2 uptake

Christoph Merten, Alexis Louis Autour

Genetic and cellular drivers of the cellular uptake of SARS-CoV-2 can be screened at high throughput via droplet microfluidics and size-exclusion methods for the analysis of the formation of fusions between cells expressing the virus's spike protein and ce ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Time-Resolved Scanning Ion Conductance Microscopy and Single-Molecule Spectroscopy

Samuel Mendes Leitão

The evolution of the 3D morphology is at the center of many relevant biological processes ranging from cellular differentiation to cancer invasion and metastasis. Microscopy techniques, such as electron microscopy (EM), super-resolution (SR) optical micros ...

EPFL2023

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

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