Publications related to Photodynamics of Lys+-Trp Protein Motifs: Hydrogen Bonds Ensure Photostability

Palladium-based supramolecular assemblies: from complex structures to water-soluble anion-receptors

The combination of palladium salts and bipyridyl ligands can lead to the formation of a large variety of coordination complexes, with different shapes and sizes, displaying a very versatile host-guest chemistry. Increasing their structural complexity remai ...

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 Frustrated Lewis Pair Active Sites in Porous Organic Scaffolds for Catalytic CO2 Hydrogenation

Anne-Clémence Corminboeuf, Jacob Terence Blaskovits, Shubhajit Das, Rubén Laplaza Solanas

Frustrated Lewis pairs (FLPs), featuring reactive combinations of Lewis acids and Lewis bases, have been utilized for myriad metal-free homogeneous catalytic processes. Immobilizing the active Lewis sites to a solid support, especially to porous scaffolds, ...

Amer Chemical Soc2024

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

Chalcogen bonding catalysis

Jieping Zhu

Catalysts play a major role in chemical synthesis, and catalysis is considered to be a green and economic process. Catalysis is dominated by covalent interactions between the catalyst and substrate. The design of non-covalent catalysts came into limelight ...

Royal Society of Chemistry2024

Autorepression of yeast Hsp70 cochaperones by intramolecular interactions involving their J-domains

Paolo De Los Rios, Bruno Claude Daniel Fauvet, Adélaïde Alice Mohr, Satyam Tiwari, Mathieu Rebeaud, Pierre Goloubinoff

The 70 kDa heat shock protein (Hsp70) chaperones control protein homeostasis in all ATP-containing cellular compartments. J-domain proteins (JDPs) coevolved with Hsp70s to trigger ATP hydrolysis and catalytically upload various substrate polypeptides in ne ...

Elsevier Science Inc2024

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 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

Grand canonical Brownian dynamics simulations of adsorption and self-assembly of SAS-6 rings on a surface

Pierre Gönczy, Niccolo Banterle

The Spindle Assembly Abnormal Protein 6 (SAS-6) forms dimers, which then self-assemble into rings that are critical for the nine-fold symmetry of the centriole organelle. It has recently been shown experimentally that the self-assembly of SAS-6 rings is st ...

AIP Publishing2023

Gas/Surface reactions probed by reflection absorption infrared spectroscopy

Harmina Vejayan

In my thesis, I present an investigation of the dissociation reactions of gas phase molecules on single crystal metal surfaces studied by a molecular beam in combination with Reflection Absorption Infrared Spectroscopy (RAIRS). Two gas/surface systems were ...

EPFL2023

Self-Assembly of N-Rich Triimidazoles on Ag(111): Mixing the Pleasures and Pains of Epitaxy and Strain

Ulrich Aschauer, Christian Wäckerlin, Xing Wang, Mehdi Heydari

In the present report, homochiral hydrogen-bonded assemblies of heavily N-doped (C9H6N6) heterocyclic triimidazole (TT) molecules on an Ag(111) substrate were investigated using scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and low energy electron diffraction (LEED) ...

Amer Chemical Soc2023

Supramolecular Modifications of Semicrystalline Polymers

Michael Alan Giffin

Supramolecular interactions play an important role in defining the structure and the resulting mechanical properties of materials. For instance, interchain hydrogen-bonding in PAs gives them superior strength and stiffness in engineering materials, while t ...

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

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

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

Plane Waves Versus Correlation-Consistent Basis Sets: A Comparison of MP2 Non-Covalent Interaction Energies in the Complete Basis Set Limit

Ursula Röthlisberger, Justin Villard, Martin Peter Bircher

Second-order Moller-Plesset perturbation theory (MP2) is the most expedient wave function-based method for considering electron correlation in quantum chemical calculations and, as such, provides a cost-effective framework to assess the effects of basis se ...

Amer Chemical Soc2023

Mechanistic Insight into Supramolecular Polymerization in Water Tunable by Molecular Geometry

Lukas Pfeifer

Supramolecular self-assembly in water based on non-covalent bonding is attracting major attention due to the potential of hydrogels and aqueous polymers in biomedical applications. Although supramolecular polymerization in organic solvents is well establis ...

CHINESE CHEMICAL SOC2022

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

Mass transport of water vapor and ions from Å-scale graphene nanopores

Wan-Chi Lee

Hydrodynamics at the nanoscale involves both fundamental study and application of fluid and mass transport phenomena in nanometer-sized confinements. Nanopores in single-layer graphene can be highly attractive for exploring the molecular transport of gas a ...

EPFL2022